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From Our Own Correspondent
BBC Radio 4
00:28:16
There's a dilemma for Jill McGivering, covering the floods in Pakistan; Gabriel in on...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent.
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BBC Correspondent
You can hear the version of the
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Gabriel Gatehouse
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Gabriel Gatehouse
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BBC Correspondent
But now, presenting the BBC Radio 4
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Narrator/Presenter
edition, here's Kate 80. Today, a dilemma for our correspondent at the Pakistan floods. Was she right to try to save the life of a newborn baby? A lexicon's updated as President Obama declares mission accomplished. In Iraq, the Chilean miners. They may be buried 700 metres below ground, but they're getting hot meals, beds, even a proposal of marriage. And three decades after the famous rumble in the jungle, we find there's a family living in Muhammad Ali's old dressing room. It's a month now since the monsoons in Pakistan caused the rivers to rise, drowning cities and villages and submerging an area the size of England. The Red Cross is appealing for an extra 50 million pounds to cope with what it calls a catastrophe of staggering proportions. Jill McGivering is one of the BBC team who's been reporting on the death, damage and misery brought by the flood waters. But one story in particular has moved her and left her feeling uneasy.
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Jill McGivering
Sometimes the scale of a tragedy is so vast, it's hard to comprehend. Eight million people in Pakistan are homeless and hungry. Sometimes it takes just one to make it all seem real. That's how I felt in succor 10 days ago. Overwhelmed people were flowing into the city at a ferocious pace. A ragged river of humanity with shocked faces and frightened eyes. They were fleeing on trucks, donkey carts, bicycles and on foot, clutching whatever was precious. Electric fans, bedding, pots and pans, chickens and goats. Behind them, a great sinister mass of flood water was pouring in. Succor itself was overflowing with families along the roadside, on river banks, on every patch of open ground. The heat was unbearable, but they had no shelter. When our car pulled up, they ran to it, flattened their faces against the windows, begged for food, for water, for help. When I got out and started to record interviews, people pressed round. Then, in all the noise and heat and smell, someone told me about a baby born by the roadside and led me off to sea. She was a tiny scrap, silent and still amid the clamour. She was lying motionless on her back on a small mat under a tree. Flies were thick round her face. The passing traffic was just feet away. Her skin was almost translucent, her head smaller than My palm balanced in a faded china saucer propped up against a stone. Her eyes were closed and lifeless. I thought at first that she was dead. Her young mother seemed vacant with shock. She'd had a difficult birth, there on the road with no one to help. Now she sat beside her baby, looking dazed. The baby wasn't feeding. She said she hadn't seen a doctor. She didn't know where to find one. I went down the road to a chaotic emergency clinic and interviewed a doctor there who promised to go and help. Then I went back to the hotel to work on a different report. The following day I was busy chasing more stories. But on the way back to the hotel in the early evening, I stopped off at the roadside with some trepidation. It seemed very likely the baby wouldn't have survived. But she had. She was weak but whimpering now and trying to move. The doctor had visited, and whatever he'd done seemed to have made all the difference. Her mother had just named her Samina. Suddenly she had a name and a hold on life. That evening I was elated. In all the misery and heat and exhaustion, I felt boosted by the thought I'd helped someone, perhaps even played a part in saving a life. It eased my sense of guilt and helplessness. The report I filed on baby Samina met with a tremendous response. Suddenly she seemed a metaphor for the general suffering. I was contacted by friends and colleagues and complete strangers. An international agency got in touch, offering to help the family. Baby Samina was becoming unwittingly a poster girl for the floods. In some ways, that's wonderful. But it also made me feel very uncomfortable. I see my job as to bear witness in a tragedy and to report, but not to interfere. I'd urged that doctor to treat baby Samina. He may have saved her, but was it at the expense of another patient? Is it unethical to attract resources to one family when millions of others may be equally deserving? This week I went back to Sakur to do a second report on Samina. Her family has a tent inside a camp now, tent number 59, with a supply of food and clean water. Samina seems stronger. She is lying on a pile of embroidered cushions instead of the ground, wriggling and yawning. Her mother's health, too, seems much better. The family's future is still uncertain, but the immediate crisis is past. Maybe I should stop there with a happy ending, which makes us all feel hopeful. But as I walked away from Samina's family, someone tugged at my sleeve. She led me to a tent nearby where another young woman had just given birth a day or two earlier. Her relatives lifted a cover to show a tiny, wrinkled newborn. The women turned to me, eager and expectant, as if they were thinking, now this foreigner will help our child, too. They looked disappointed when all I could do was to say thank you, congratulate them, and then turn to leave.
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Narrator/Presenter
Jill McGivering the American envoy George Mitchell has described this week's resumption of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians as constructive. But away from Washington, there was little positive being said about this first face to face meeting in two years. In Gaza, militants declared they'd step up their assaults on Israeli targets. A spokesman for Hamas said 13 groups had joined forces to launch what he called more effective attacks. Wira Davis has spent the past week travelling around the region finding out what people think of the talks and their likely outcome.
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Wira Davis
Have you heard the joke about the optimist at the Middle east peace talks in Washington? What optimist? It's not a particularly funny or original joke, but it makes the point well. It's very hard to find anyone who honestly expects this process to achieve an elusive and historic peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. After an unbearably hot and dusty summer in the region, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators appeared to be making little progress in direct talks. But the persuasive skills and infectious enthusiasm of Barack Obama eventually succeeded in getting Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas to sit around the same table in a renewed bid for peace. So surely someone somewhere would be writing, arguing or debating in positive terms about a golden chance to strike a deal, not a hope. Rarely can a process or an event have begun with such an air of negativity. I've spent much of the last week traveling across Israel and the Palestinian west bank and around Jerusalem in search of that most elusive of people, someone who is genuinely optimistic about peace in the Middle East. All of the above is not to say that there aren't tangible signs of progress and hope in this troubled region. Some parts of the Palestinian west bank, for example, have enjoyed a mini economic boom in the last couple of years, thanks to more serious efforts at nation building and self sufficiency on the Palestinian side and a genuine easing of Israel's military and economic stranglehold in the occupied territories. In the middle of the busy west bank town of Ramallah, I met Tawfiq Nassar. He's a Palestinian businessman who imports aluminium for the expanding construction and industrial sector. Mr. Nassar's business employs 12 local people, and he doesn't deny that the economic situation here is much better than it's been for many years. But as I struggle to hear his voice above the din of rush hour traffic and building projects all around us, Mr. Nassar said his business was still hit by the vagaries of Israel's security crackdowns and unpredictable import bans. A well traveled, well spoken and generally positive man, Tawfiq Nassar nonetheless thought that Israel's overwhelming obsession with security meant a workable peace deal, and an independent Palestinian state was still an impossible dream. The inescapable problem is that there are simply so many areas in which both sides have fundamental differences. If they can agree on economic matters, they may stall on the future of Jerusalem. Progress on the issue of Israeli security may be offset by deep arguments about Palestinian refugees. And then there are the settlements. After saying goodbye to Mr. Nassar, I made the short journey to a windy hilltop to the north and the settlement of Beit El. Dotted around Ramallah are several neat, lush Jewish settlements, identifiable by their orderly streets and red roofed houses. There are more than 120 settlements in the west bank of various sizes. They're illegal under international law because they're built on occupied Palestinian territory. To the 400,000 settlers who now live in the west bank and Arab East Jerusalem, they're seen as pioneering communities on what is historically Jewish land. In Beit El, regarded as a religiously observant settlement, I met Yishai Fleischer, a lawyer and radio presenter. Mr. Fleischer insisted that he wanted to live in peace with his Arab neighbors, and indeed he acknowledged that the security situation in the area had improved markedly in recent years. But there he drew the line. This settler and many others in the community say they simply won't allow Mr. Netanyahu to abandon settlements like Betel as part of a peace deal. Like many right wing voters who normally support Israel's coalition government, Mr. Fleischer isn't wishing these talks any success. The shooting dead recently of four settlers by militants from Hamas was a stark message that there are some prepared to go even further in order to sabotage the peace process. Business people, settlers, journalists, politicians everyone I spoke to seemed to have an unwaveringly pessimistic take on the peace talks, whatever their politics or background. Slightly deflated, scorched by the sun and with a throat dry from dust, I returned to Jerusalem. My next unrelated assignment was an interview with a Nobel Prize winning laureate and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, who was in town to receive an award. A survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald the affable and very sharp 81 year old has perhaps more just cause than most people to be wary about making peace with former enemies. But the celebrated author of more than 60 books has clearly been speaking on a very personal level with Mr. Obama, declaring that he was impressed by the president's sincerity and commitment to peace, Elie Wiesel looked at me and said that he too was very optimistic about the chances for peace. I'm a very poor prophet and I've been wrong in the past, he quickly added. But that didn't matter. I'd found my optimist.
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Narrator/Presenter
Wira Davis in Jerusalem the United States has now officially ended its combat mission in Iraq. The occasion was marked on Wednesday with a ceremony in Baghdad and an address by President Obama at the White House. Over the past few months, tens of thousands of soldiers have left Iraq, sent home as part of a commitment to get all U.S. troops out of the country by the end of next year. But 50,000 are still there, and Iraq is still a violent country. Hundreds of people are killed in bombings and shootings every month, and our man in Baghdad, Gabriel Gatehouse, feels this week's ceremonials were more of a rebranding exercise than a milestone.
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Gabriel Gatehouse
As the late August sun rose over an American military base on the outskirts of Kirkuk, I sat on the step of a porter cabin sipping my morning coffee. The mug was emblazoned with the words Operation New Dawn. A day before the official end of combat operations. The commemorative merchandise of was already on sale. I'd stayed on this base before, in October last year. Then it was teeming with soldiers. Now the place felt deserted, the canteen half empty, only the odd armored vehicle rumbling its way along the dusty lanes of the camp. Thousands of US Troops have left this base, sent back home as part of America's so called responsible drawdown. In the lexicon of the US Military, drawdown is the opposite of a surge. Removing tens of thousands of soldiers from Iraq is not a withdrawal that would imply a lack of commitment, a loss of interest. It's most certainly not a retreat that would imply defeat. No, it's a drawdown. And a responsible one at that. In official speeches and press releases, these two words always go together. And how fitting that the final chapter of America's military involvement in Iraq should have its own stock epithet, just like the characters in in the great Homeric epic myths. Swift footed Achilles, Wily Odysseus. A day later, on the outskirts of Baghdad, on another American base known as Camp Victory, the assembled foreign press was herded into one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces. In a marble clad central hall overhung by a massive chandelier, soldiers and dignitaries watched as a flag was solemnly passed from one American general to another. And with that, seven years of combat in Iraq, a mission known as Operation Iraqi Freedom, segued seamlessly into Operation New Dawn. That ceremony was Obama's mission accomplished moment. Of course, President Obama didn't appear wearing a flight suit, as George Bush had done in 2003, to proclaim victory on the deck of an aircraft carrier in the gulf. But the careful choice of words filters down to the lower ranks and to the press and through them, to the American people. The message is job done. Before the ceremony began, around a dozen officers were on hand to rotate around the hall, giving 10 minute interviews to the media, a sort of speed dating with generals. I asked one of these generals whether it had all been worth it. He said he thought it had. He talked about the overthrow of a dictator and all that he stood for and all that he did to hurt the people of Iraq. And you've now had two elections, he said. You have a democratically elected leadership. A few days earlier, I'd put the same question to an Iraqi in his late 20s. After the invasion, he'd worked for the Americans as an interpreter until death threats forced him to quit. But he's still an Americaphile, a heavy metal fan who plans to move to Texas and start a new life. Why was he leaving? I asked him. Because he said he didn't feel free in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, we were more free, he said. Free to wear the clothes he liked, free to listen to the kind of music he wanted. Nowadays, he said, those kinds of choices could get you killed. The idea of freedom with a capital F is very important to the Americans. Here, the military bases are festooned with banners sent to Iraq by grateful school children back home, thanking the troops for the gift of freedom. It is this gift that many believe they have also bestowed on the Iraqi people. The toppling of Saddam and the holding of democratic elections attest to this fact. The transition from Operation Iraqi Freedom to Operation New dawn implies that that goal has been achieved. But the reality is this. There are still nearly 50,000American troops in Iraq, and Iraqis are still being killed in large numbers. Iraq was not Obama's war. He promised to end it and to bring the troops home. But in order to do so with America's pride intact and with an eye on the midterm elections, the US is building a myth around this departure, using words rather than guns. This process has been underway for some time now. A few months ago, an aide to a high ranking American general invited me on something called a peace field rotation. When I asked what that was, the aide responded that they were trying to phase out the word battlefield. Now that security had improved, not everyone is convinced. On our way to the ceremony, we had our documents checked by an American soldier. You guys make sure you do a good job now. He shouted after us as we went on of reporting the absolute zero change that's going on here today. Somebody take a picture of me, he added, grinning under the scorching sun of the Iraqi summer, because apparently I'm already home.
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Narrator/Presenter
Gabriel Gatehouse in Baghdad. A new boring machine will start work in northern Chile tomorrow, drilling another shaft down to the 33 miners who've been trapped underground for nearly a month. One's already being used to send supplies down to the men below. This week they were able to enjoy their first hot meal in almost four weeks. It was meatballs with rice. Next, a fiber optic cable will be lowered, enabling them to talk to their families over a video link. But it's still thought that it will take three to four months to rescue the men who are 700 metres below ground. Our correspondent James Reynolds has been talking to the anxious wives and children who are camped out at the San Jose mine in the Atacama Desert.
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James Reynolds
Chile has one of the most catchy national anthems in the world. It's an incredibly simple and predictable song. There's an opening verse about how astonishingly beautiful the country happens to be. This is followed by a rousing chorus about how great the country generally is. Everyone knows the words. People in Chile tend to sing it as often as they can before football matches, after football matches, at parties. I once saw a man in Santiago sing it quite happily by the side of the road. So it's no particular surprise that the main activity of the trapped miners appears to be singing the Chilean national anthem. They sang it during their first phone conversation with the outside world after they were found. And they sang it again at the end of the first video that they sent up from beneath the earth. If anyone's worried about the health of the men's lungs after a month stuck underground in a mine, they should listen to how loud they're able to sing. The 33 miners are cut off 700 meters underground in a country which likes to see itself as one of the most isolated in the world. Chile is stuck between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountains. But this mining accident happened not. Not because of Chile's isolation. But because of its connection to the rest of the world, this country is the world's largest producer of copper. In recent years, the price of copper has gone up, and that means that old and sometimes dangerous mines in northern Chile have reopened, including San Jose. To get to the mine itself, you have to drive through the Atacama desert, past patches of wild purple flowers on the hillside. Outside the mine. The the families of the trapped miners have set up a tent village known as Camp Hope. At night, when the desert gets cold, the families sit around log fires. Cristina Nunez is the partner of Claudio Yanez. Two months ago, before he went down the mine, Claudio asked Cristina to marry him. It wasn't a particularly surprising request. The two had been going out for 10 years. They lived together. They even have two daughters. But Christina said no. Then Claudio got trapped in the mine. After the miners were found, Cristina sent him a letter. In this letter, she proposed to him. She waited rather nervously for his reply. His letter came back up from the mine. It was a yes. Christina says that the two will get married as soon as Claudio is rescued. Meanwhile, the camp outside the mine has become a kind of religious shrine. In the main canteen there is a statue of San Lorenzo, the patron saint of miners, with a small miner's lamp in his hand. Evangelical pastors wander around the camp. They're easy to spot. They're the only ones wearing jackets and ties. One pastor, Carlos Parra, told me that he'd sent 33 mini Bibles down to the miners. He was keen to show me that he'd highlighted various passages for the miners with a green fluorescent pen. I interviewed him in Spanish, but he kept breaking into broken English whenever I asked him about the rescue. Jesus is the rescuitist, he said. You mean the rescuer? I asked. Ah, yes. And plenty of others put their faith in God as well. It is a miracle, a miracle, one preacher in a cowboy hat announced from a stage next to the canteen. But not everyone agrees. The local Catholic bishop issued a ruling saying that while the discovery of the miners was a truly wonderful event, it did not actually count as an official miracle. That theological debate won't worry too many people. Keeping the miners healthy and comfortable has been much more important. Every day, relief workers send as much as they can down a small supply line, which is about the diameter of a tin can. The miners have been sent collapsible beds, medicine, MP3 players, energy drinks, vaccination kits, soap, socks, underwear. Their first hot meal was meatballs and rice. Some reporters at the camp want to know much more Are they depressed because they haven't had alcohol? One journalist asked the health minister. How will they cope without women? Asked another. Neither question was answered. No doubt to the relief of the miners underground, the men will spend the next few months helping their rescuers. They'll have to dig away tons of debris. When they're not working, the miners will play dominoes and write letters to their families. They may even sing the national anthem. I wonder if they've thought about the words of the chorus. Sweet Fatherland, you will be the tomb of the free. The 33 expect to be freed. They refuse to let the mine become their tomb.
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Narrator/Presenter
James Reynolds. More than three decades have now passed since the fight many boxing fans will tell you was the greatest of all time. This was the so called Rumble in the Jungle when Muhammad Ali took on the then champion of the world, George Foreman, on a steamy night in the city of Kinshasa. These days, the scene of that famous encounter is looking somewhat faded, as Andy Kershaw has been finding out.
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BBC Correspondent
The first surprise in this city in which only the unpredictable is predictable, was that I got in beyond the stadium gates without hindrance and without having to cough up a bribe. A straggle of human traffic was coming and going and slipping into the floor. I simply wandered through the Tata Rafael Stadium. Just like Congo, it's reverted to its original name was in October 1980, 1974, the 20th May Stadium in a country then freshly rebranded as Zaire. And it commemorates the Belgian Catholic priest and philanthropist whose enthusiasm and organisation of sport for Congolese youth got it built in 1951. There is just inside the gate, a monument to the old missionary's generosity, but absurdly nothing to recognise that it was in this arena that that the most celebrated fight in boxing history took place. We were all scared for Muhammad Ali that night. At 32, he was too old. His younger, fearsome opponent, George Foreman, the champion, was too strong. We wanted a miracle. We expected catastrophe. Ali was in danger of wrecking his own legend. For more than seven shocking rounds, Ali against the ropes, soaked up for Foreman's punches, all the while taunting his opponent. Is that the best you got, George? He yelled through his gloves. Harder, sucker. Swing harder. You the champion. They told me you could punch routinely in training. Foreman's blows had split open the heavy bag. Early in the eighth, with a lightning bolt of a right, Ali flattened Big George to become, against all predictions, heavyweight champion for the second time. And the world went nuts. Now, it might sound daft to say I felt sorry for a stadium, but gazing out from the top of the terraces the other day I did. Evidence of its night of glory and history is now camouflaged by decay. The seating and handrails have rusted in places to powder. Trees and shrubs are sprouting through the crumbling cement of some of the walkways. Litter rattles along the aisles. Excrement is everywhere. I made my way into, and I choose the word with precision, the bowels of the arena where I knew the fighters dressing rooms had been. A few yellowed and ragged newspaper cuttings about Muhammad Ali somehow clung to the peeling light blue institutional paint. A mildewed United States flag hung from a nearby pillar. A few steps in the semi darkness and then instant recognition from photos in my boxing books and the footage in the documentary When We Were Kings. This was Ali's dressing room. I recognized the columns and the vents on the wall. It was just there where Ali had laid on a bench straight after his triumph, truly to feel Foreman's heavy blows for the first time. 36 years later and the room is occupied again. From behind a yellow curtain and as though in disgrace emerged a young man. A slender girl came out to follow him. She was carrying a child which she placed down on the floor to crawl in the dirt. Muhammad Ali's rumble in the jungle throne room is for Makula Kaunda, his wife Sandrine and the one year old daughter Jessica home. The tenancy of this now squalid, gloomy bunker is legitimate, government approved. In fact we can't afford a house. I earn only US$19 a month, McCullough explained. I'm a civil servant working for the Ministry of Sport. The Ministry lets us stay here. The couple allowed me to look behind their curtain. Under a line of washing was a single plastic chair, a washing up bowl and a paraffin stove. And that was it. There's no men's water. Their toilet is the stadium, Mikula explained. I also wanted to see what had become of George Foreman's billet. But two men of no identifiable position or authority blocked my path. What did we want? I told them and showed them our government press accreditation. Impossible to go there, one said. You need the permission of le chef, said the other chef boss. Surely no one was employed to administer a derelict defunct stadium. I will go and get him, said the first chap. And he beetled off into the dark. My local translator was getting very jumpy. Come on, come on, we must go. The boss is going to want a lot of money from us and if we don't pay we'll be arrested. So we hastened for the smelly stairs. In doing so, half way between the dressing rooms, we passed some rusting steel gates across a tunnel. At the far end was daylight and a glimpse of the stadium pitch. This, then, must have been the route which Ali walked that night towards true greatness. I lingered just for a second and imagined the electricity of that moment. Then, tearing myself away, and with something less than greatness, I scurried out to the anonymity of the street.
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Narrator/Presenter
And with Andy Kershaw bobbing and weaving in Kinshasa, we've reached the end of this edition. I'll be back with more from our own correspondence next Saturday. Do join us. Goodbye.