← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Unanswered Questions
00:28:12
Kate Adie introduces reports from correspondents around the world. Following the death...
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Host/Presenter
You're listening to a download from the BBC.
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BBC Correspondent
This is from our own correspondent.
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Host/Presenter
You can hear the version of the
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BBC Correspondent
programme we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our site at BBConline.
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Narrator/Reporter
But here's the latest edition broadcast on
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BBC Correspondent
BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate
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Narrator/Reporter
Ady today, the high price paid by Indonesia's gold miners why Books Are More Powerful than Guns in Somaliland we try not to make a linguistic faux pas on the Caribbean island of Martinique, and we're looking back on more romantic times with the former Casanovas of Italy. Campaigners in India have welcomed a judge's decision to sentence four men to death for the rape and murder of a 23 year old student in Delhi last December. Her case caused outrage and protests across the country. Campaigners are calling for more to be done for women's safety in India. The controversy has caused Rupa Jha to reflect on her own personal experience of some disturbing events from her childhood.
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Rupa Jha
I don't have many particularly vivid memories of my early childhood, but the images of sexual abuse never go away. I was barely seven years old, living in a typically large middle class family with five siblings and numerous other relatives sharing a two bedroom flat with a terrace. My mother, a housewife, was always busy with the business of running such a big family on very limited resources. My father had so much to do just to feed all of us. I love being a part of this huge family. It gave me a strong sense of home, but it also made me an easy prey for sexual abuse. Distant relatives and cousins kept coming and going through the family home. Being the youngest girl in the family, I was loved by them. These love sessions would happen only when I was alone with one of them. I hated it, but like many others in the same situation, I was too petrified to talk about it. Getting rubbed, touched or kissed or being locked in bathrooms, that was the love. Even though the house was always full, I felt completely lonely and violated. I remember the feeling very clearly and I remember when it all came to a head for me. I must have been around 10 years old after years of these regular assaults. One day I just broke down and started howling sitting on the floor. Gofinder was shocked and petrified. Why was I making a fuss after so long? What's changed? I remember my elder sister hitting him hard until she tired from their fert. My parents immediately asked him to leave the family home and that was just about it. End of the chapter. After that we all carried on as if nothing had happened. I'm not sure what impact it had on Me, I didn't start hating men. I grew up a happy child. I became independent. My parents must have felt that all was well with me and the world. Later I began to wonder why they never reported the matter to the police. Why was he allowed to go scot free? Was my otherwise liberal modern family worried about honour? Family honour had never been a point of debate, but it seems in my case it became more important than facing up to what happened to me. Or was it something else? Decades after the trauma, I have not yet asked these questions to my parents. I still don't know the answers. But talking to my sisters, cousins and friends, I discovered a sorority of the abused. So many of them suffered similarly harrowing experiences. Experiences of abuse which were followed swiftly by experiences of silence, forgetting and then pretending these things did not happen at all. Then the news came in about the four guilty men being sentenced to death for the fatal gang rape of a student in Delhi last December. I again wondered, when will the ometa of silence about abuse in Indian homes be broken? The Nobel laureate economist Amart Sen famously talked about the argumentative Indian In a country of a million mutinies and conversations, this is very true. But as one commentator recently said, we seem to be argumentative about everything except our own selves. When will our families begin debating the roots and causes of sexual abuse of young girls and boys and women? There is enough conversation happening about how to make women safer in public spaces. This is heartening and encouraging. But while the case of the 23 year old student was a random attack on a stranger, Indian police records say that in more than 90% of the cases of sexual violence, the offenders are known to their victims. So what is to be done? Clearly, homes and neighbourhoods are more unsafe than public spaces. This was certainly my own experience. This is where the change has to happen. India needs to talk to itself more to make its homes safer for women and to make sure that my six year old daughter's generation will not have to live with unanswered questions and silence.
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Narrator/Reporter
Rupa Jha in Delhi. All thing which that shineth as the gold, nay is no gold as I have heard it told. So Chaucer said, and a certain William Shakespeare put it into his own words. But the lure of gold is strong and after a dip in the price earlier this year, the precious metal is again climbing in value. There are large producers of gold around the world, but around 15% of stocks are supplied by millions of small scaled, unlicensed, often extremely poor miners. Indonesia is one of the largest informal producers of gold but it's a high risk industry, as Linda Presley found on a recent visit to Kalimantan, part of the island of Borneo.
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BBC Correspondent
Faroul veers to the left as he attempts to walk along the medical clinic's corridor in a straight line. A solid man in his early 40s, his coordination is all over the place and he's a bit embarrassed. Stefan Bose O'Reilly, a medical doctor from Germany who's putting Farral through a battery of tests, is reassuring. When Farrall closes his eyes, they have a slight tremor and he complains of frequent headaches, of a metallic taste in his mouth. It's bitter, he says. Faroul is being very slowly poisoned. These are the typical symptoms of mercury intoxication, says Stefan with an audible depressed sigh. He snips a bit of Faroul's hair for analysis back in the lab in Germany, and then Farul lopes off in his flip flops with a plastic cup in hand, a receptacle for a urine sample, wearing Kerimpangi in central Kalimantan. It's a grubby gold rush town dedicated to serving thousands of unlicensed miners who work the tropical soil, dreaming of a fast buck, an easier life, maybe even a moped. Miners use mercury to help extract gold from the rock or soil. Farrall isn't a miner, he's a shop owner. The miners bring him the fruits of their labour, usually a pea sized piece of amalgam consisting of mercury mixed with gold. Ferrule burns it and the mercury evaporates, leaving the gold behind. But the fumes are highly toxic, which is why smelters often show more severe signs of poisoning than miners who slosh mercury around in buckets at the makeshift sites outdoors. Stefan Bose O'Reilly was a surprise addition to our trip. He's a supremely calm, no nonsense doctor from Munich in sensible sandals, and he's passionate about raising awareness of the dangers of mercury. I got in touch with him about a study he'd done, the only one I could find on the effects of mercury on gold miners in Indonesia. Then, excited by our plans to visit Kalimantan a week before we were due to travel and after securing funds to cover his flight, he announced he'd like to join us. Stefan works methodically in the clinic in Kerimpangi. There are more gold smelters like Faroul displaying symptoms. Mercury is a neurotoxin, it harms the brain and the effects of heavy or prolonged exposure to it are are irreversible. After a morning at the clinic we head out to the mining area. I wasn't quite prepared for the assault on my senses. You hear it before you see it. A deafening roar of engines powering suction pumps that deposit tons of slurry onto mechanical sluices designed to collect those elusive gold particles. The stink of diesel hangs in the air. We stand in a cleared area between massive pools of muddy water. And I'm glad I'm wearing a fairly butch pair of bo. Just months ago, this was virgin rainforest. You have to adjust your vision because everything's the same dirty color. The earth, the machines, the water, the dead tree stumps, the miners. 20 metres away, someone puts a cigarette in his mouth and it shines like a tiny beacon, clean and white against the endless brown. In the distance, we can see the edge of the jungle. Borneo is famous for its orangutans. But as the miners continue to clear the forest, these large endangered apes find themselves with fewer and fewer trees to swing through. And the miners use of toxic substances like mercury means that even if this denuded area were left for 50 years, it would have no chance of becoming rainforest again. Back in Kerimpangi, we visit Farul in his gold shop. He sits behind a wooden counter. To one side is the blowtorch he uses to smelt the noxious amalgam. I ask him about Stefan's preliminary assessment of his health. That Farool is poisoned with mercury, but Ferule can't see any way to change things. I have to do this to make a living, he says. Although he knows his health could deteriorate further, he's convinced himself the risk is small. Stefan sent me the results from the samples he took in Kalimantan. He recorded a level of 697 micrograms of mercury per liter in. In Faroul's urine. You or I might have one or two at most. It's unbelievably high, says Stefan, talking on the phone from Germany. He's angry. He thinks this has the makings of a tragedy. There are millions of gold miners all over the world, he says, and the price they're paying for gold with their health is just too great.
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Narrator/Reporter
Linda Presley. You can hear more about the gold miners of Indonesia in Crossing Continents on Thursday morning. War, terror, piracy and famine are words many people associate with Somalia. A suicide bomb attack on a restaurant in the capital, Mogadishu killed and injured dozens of people a week ago. The troubled East African country has come top of a list of the world's most failed states for six years in a row. But Mary Harper says life is strikingly different in one corner of Somalia, the breakaway territory called Somaliland.
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Mary Harper
Macbeth, Crime and Punishment, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. No, I'm not standing in the classic section of a bookshop in London or New York. I'm standing on Somali soil. Or should I say sand? At the Hargeysa International Book Fair, now in its sixth year, one of the volunteers at the fair is a plump cheeked, smiley young lady in a headscarf with a baseball cap balanced precariously on top. I ask her which of the Western books is the most popular. War and Peace, she says without hesitation. It's an appropriate title. War has torn Somalia apart for more than two decades, but peace has come to Somaliland, this breakaway territory that's invisible on maps and in the United Nations. Somaliland is recognized by nobody, but functions as if it were an independent country with elections, a government, an army and a currency. Britain this year warned UK citizens to leave Somaliland immediately because of what it described as a specific threat from terrorists and kidnappers. But people from all sorts of countries, including Britain's, ignored the warning and attended the book fair, even a Czech supermodel who has graced the covers of Vogue, Cosmopolitan and Sports Illustrated. But she attracts far less attention than the poet Hadrawi, known as the Somali Shakespeare. This humble, gentle man takes to the stage with an equally humble, gentle Scot, the poet Bill Herbert, to launch the first ever English translation of his work. It's like a rock concert. The hall is packed with people sitting, standing, squeezed together, all clapping in rhythm. Those who can't fit inside cling to the windows to get a peek at their hero. Boys and girls throng around giant screens outside, for this is one of the amazing things about Somaliland. Young people love poems. They're crazy for books. They adore the book fair and pack it out every day after one event. The director of the fair, Jama Musajama, shows me the hairs on his arms. They're literally standing up on end. Did you hear that young boy? He says, asking the British author Michaela Rong about something she wrote in chapter 17 of her book on Eritrea. That book only went on sale yesterday, and that young man is already on chapter 17. It's young men like this who, just a few hundred kilometres to the south, blow themselves up as suicide bombers who, as teenagers, take up arms for the Islamist group Al Shabaab and the dozens of other militias that prowl around Somalia. It sounds like a cliche, but in Somaliland, people really have exchanged their swords for pens they've rejected, suicide vests for books of poetry. Many of the visitors to the fair are Somalis on their summer holidays. Somaliland is a tourist hotspot for members of the diaspora. Families from Canada, Norway, Australia, Holland and Dubai gorge on camel meat and fresh watermelon juice. In the many outdoor restaurants of Hargeisa, romances blossom between young Somalis from Cardiff, London, Birmingham and Liverpool. Some find it difficult. I meet a teenage girl weeping in the ladies room of a hotel. I hate it here, she sobs. I miss London. A few days later I bump into her again. She's giggling away with a crowd of friends. I don't hate it anymore, she says in a Cockney accent. I love it. And there's a lot to love and enjoy in Somaliland, despite its precarious international status and proximity to the complex, seemingly never ending conflict in Somalia. Every time I go there, I notice new things in the territory that 20 years ago was reduced to rubble in a civil war. Multi storey glass buildings, shopping malls, hotels, business headquarters, fleets of yellow taxi cabs, beauty parlours with secret women's worlds going on inside, a Toyota showroom, a Coca Cola factory in the desert, a Turkish company prospecting for oil. It's almost unbelievable that all of this is happening in a territory that doesn't officially exist, that, unlike the rest of Somalia, has not had billions of dollars thrown at it by the outside world, that hasn't had foreign interventions and endless, expensive international conferences. It's extraordinary that for the 22 years of its existence that it hasn't caught the Somali diseases of war, terror, piracy and famine. The answer, perhaps, lies in the spirit of the book fair. To hold such an event requires imagination, determination and courage. Somaliland is far from perfect, but it's a plucky place with a plucky people who prefer books to guns.
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Narrator/Reporter
Mary Harper the island of Martinique is a slice of mainland France in the Caribbean. Administratively, it's a French department and unlike most of its English speaking neighbours, which are now independent, there are undoubted benefits to still being ruled by France. And it's not just cafe and croissants. The roads, schools, the health service, the lack of poverty are the envy of other Caribbean nations. But Lindsay John says it does also lead to cultural confusion and a loss of identity.
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Host/Presenter
So I'm sitting in a cafe in downtown Faux de France, azure blue sky overhead, with mom and Pops, overjoyed to see them again after a number of years. I order a coffee, a sugar cane juice and rum for us, while Papi picks his teeth and stoically watches the passersby. Mami and Pappy, Paulette and Clement, 80 and 85 respectively, are Martinique's finest. He's traveled the world with the French army and Ancien Militaire, while she's only ever left the island once to visit their son in Paris. I'm profoundly blessed to have them as my adopted parents from when I used to live here 15 years ago. The waiter brings the espresso, the sugarcane juice, and a bottle of local La Monnie rum. If this combination of beverages strikes you as somewhat strange, then welcome to Martinique, a gloriously incongruous cultural enigma, a historical conundrum, and like its sister island, Guadeloupe, an unashamedly Gallic outpost in the middle of the Caribbean. Hello, Rem pour monsieur, says the waiter officiously placing the glass of fire water in front of Pops with an unbecoming clinical efficiency, as if frowning on his penchant for a tipple this early in the morning. The waiter is white and speaks in clipped, precise French vowels. He's a metropole here for the sunshine, the pretty women and the quality of life, often to the annoyance of the locals. He puts down a basket of fresh croissants as readily as if we were in the 16th arrondissement in Paris. French is the national language here, as opposed to Creole, a French based patois with an African syntax and the mother tongue of people like Mami and Papi. The politics of when to speak French and when to speak Creole are a veritable minefield. Reply in Creole to someone speaking to you in French and you're considered uncouth, uneducated, rude even. Reply in French to someone speaking to you in Creole and you're deemed uppity, thinking yourself better than your fellow islander, arrogantly denying the linguistic and cultural heritage of which you should be proud. Pops mutters a polite Merci beaucoup to the waiter, but I know he's yearning to break free from the stifling shackles of linguistic convention and reply in his beloved Creole. A stunning bejewelled woman of a certain age, effortlessly combining raw Creole beauty and Gallic chic, walks demurely past the cafe in her high heels, visibly sweltering in her figure hugging woolen Chanel suit. We may be in the tropics, but she makes no concession whatsoever on the French sense of style and sartorial elegance, even as the sweat on her face makes her mascara run. Pops winks at me surreptitiously as she walks by and out of earshot of Mammy, whispers belshabin la before downing his rum in one. Shabin is the Creole word for light skinned woman, as if the lightness of her skin and her beauty are somehow synonymous. In fact, on this island they sadly often are. The epithet Belshabin, meaning beautiful light skinned woman, is one which you hear frequently in Martinique, a testament to both, it must be said, the sheer abundance of feminine pulchritude, but also to the way that skin tone still governs notions of what is beautiful. The pigmentocracy which to this day tacitly operates here is one of the more painful and pernicious legacies of French colonialism. In the cafe, a sensual Zouque love song plays over the radio and is carried to us on the warm breeze. It's Gilles Floreau's iconic anthem Caramel from a few years back, in which he eulogizes the beauty of surprise, surprise, a caramel complexioned woman. A friend of Pops stops for a brief chat in Creole, of course. After he's gone, Pops, with an endearing sardonic twinkle in his eye, jokingly says, bugle et hublio foi mem la that man's forgotten in the oven. A joke which I guess a dark skinned person like Pops is perfectly entitled to make about another equally dark skinned person, even if it might conflict with our acutely sensitive PC linguistic mores back in Britain. For all their idiosyncrasies, I passionately love this island and its people, but I think Martinicans would be the first to admit that their sense of what it means to be black and French is often misguided, conflicted and at times deeply troubling. Francais parazard de l' histoire French, by an accident of history, is how Pops describes it, and he's certainly not wrong. We pay the bill and walk off up the street, passing boulangeries, patisseries and even fromageries. I for one know that I would forego in a heartbeat the coffee, the croissants and the trappings of Frenchness in favor of a people who are more bien l' az dans le peau, at ease in their own skin and in love with themselves the way they are not trying to slavishly emulate someone else's vision of how they should be.
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Narrator/Reporter
Lindsay Johns on Martinique's French heritage According to George Osborne, the British economy has turned a corner. It's true official growth figures are looking more healthy than they have for years, but there are also plenty of warnings out there that it's premature to talk about economic recovery. Spare a thought, though, for some of our European friends, like the Italians, who are still languishing in recession after years of austerity, Many Italians have had to alter their habits, and men in particular still have to keep their belts tightened. In more ways than one, says Emma Jane Kirby.
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Emma Jane Kirby
In the queue at the ice cream parlour, the two businessmen jiggled anxiously and salivated like schoolboys as they stared at the myriad flavours of gelato before them. When it came to their turn, though, they looked a little deflated, even a little ashamed, as they asked the impatient waitress in small voices for a gelato piccolo. Yes, everything's downsized here, said the taller man ruefully, looking down at his modest single scoop of chocolate ice cream. No money for anything now. Not even for women. He licked his spoon thoughtfully. The day of Casanova is over. One woman only, and that's already too expensive. His colleague scraped his tub clean, searching out the last drops. He flashed me a winning smile. The good times finished, he announced. And then, shrugging his shoulders, he whispered confidentially, I'm an ex Casanova. The economic crisis has hit Italian men where it hurts most. With their country still in recession and the cost of living soaring, the Latin lover has had to rein in his appetite. The traditional kept mistress, secretly hidden away in her fully paid up, flat and lavished with furs and jewels, has been consigned to history. Who can afford a double life today? Asked journalist Terry Morocco from the Italian news magazine Panorama. Think about it. Two Christmases, two apartments, two dinners, double holiday. It's impossible. She laughed. In fact, Italian men are now so hard up they're having to ask their lovers to share the bill. I know one mistress who'd been taken to a hotel for a romantic break. But when they were leaving, the man asked, can we go half and half? Discreet inquiries around Milan suggested that there are certainly fewer, shall we say, lunchtime visits to hotels these days? And according to surveys by an Italian casual dating website, Casanova has dispensed with the flowery niceties of wining and dining and is cutting far more quickly to the chase. Italian men are becoming less romantic and less gentlemanly, complained Mariangela Chimienti from the Italian online company Sedate. Before the crisis, a man would ask a woman to dinner, would buy her flowers before he she trailed off sensitively. Nowadays he just invites her for a coffee and a walk in the park. A recent study by the Italian association of Divorce Lawyers suggested that Milan is the cheating capital of Italy. But infidelity comes at a price, and it's a price most Italian men can no longer afford Divorce is down by 35% here since 2008. Not because Casanova is putting all he's got into his marriage, but more because he can't afford to take anything out of it. Splitting up in Italy is a lengthy and expensive affair. In her sumptuous Milan apartment, Roberta Riballi, a psychiatrist who specialises in men's sexual problems, absentmindedly stroked the plush red velvet of her therapist's couch. For the older Italian man, this sudden lack of money is a tragedy, she said sorrowfully. These men have always seen money as power and they've used their money as to buy women, she sighed. The younger man can adapt. He can use his charm, his good looks to win over women. But for the older man, who already has some hormonal problems, it's very difficult for his self confidence. She flicked through her diary thoughtfully. You know, there is a cheaper option for the older Casanova, she said suddenly. On the Internet. With just a little money, you can buy a nice friend. Well, she's a prostitute, but she can become a friend. And you don't need to buy her furs and jewels like the traditional mistress. She nodded, approving her idea. Yes, this could be the solution with the help of Viagra. In the centre of Milan, the pavement cafes are still packed with groups of men taking their aperitivi after work and eyeing up the neighbouring tables of women. Andrea and Filippo, looking slightly stiff in their black business suits, listened in envy to the boasts of their friend Jacopo, who in his designer T shirt and combat trousers looked decidedly cool and confident. He works for an oil company, filippo explained to me. He's basically got a girl in every country, but it's cheap for him because he only stays two nights in each place, so he doesn't need to buy presents and dinners. I patted his shoulder comfortingly. So you've just got the one girl? I asked him sympathetically. No, he muttered. I don't get paid much. So he looked miserably into the distance. But at Christmas maybe I'll get a bonus, he said hopefully.
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Narrator/Reporter
Emma Jane Kirby with Italy's ex Casanovas Hoping for better times. That's all for this edition. I'll be back with more from our own correspondence next Saturday.