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From Our Own Correspondent
A City of Intrigue
00:27:59
A secret city, melted cheese, female freedom fighters, buried treasure, an emperor's...
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Hello from the.
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From our own correspondence studios at Broadcasting
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House in London, you've downloaded the latest edition of the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Hello. Today, a secret Syrian city, a place of plotting and intrigue. And it's not in Syria. There's a new security sweep ahead of the Winter Olympics in Sochi. But are they picking up the wrong people? Two men called Marco take us underground to learn more about a pilgrim imperfect world dreamed up by a Roman emperor and it's been dismissed as a Taj Mahal of moronic madness. But an Indian holy man insists he knows where a thousand tons of gold are buried. Syria's opposition National Coalition says it hasn't yet decided whether it will attend the so called Geneva II peace conference later this month. It'll face pressure to be there at a meeting in Paris tomorrow of the so called Friends of Syria, a grouping of countries which backs the uprising against President and Bashar Al Assad. But ahead of Geneva too, talks about the future of Syria, some more secretive than others, are already going on in a variety of locations. Tim Huell's just back from one such place in Turkey.
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The two stickiest things I encountered in Gaziantep fall into opposite categories. Delicious and disgusting. One I couldn't get out of my teeth, the other off my boots. The first was cheese, brilliantly white sweet cheese. The second was brown slime. I'll tell you about the cheese first in the hope that you'll keep listening. It's melted cheese bound up in the finest threads of pastry, saturated in syrup and rose water, concealed under a pale green topping of crushed pistachio. It's called kanafa in Arabic, kunefa in Turkish, and people rave about it. In Gaziantep there are whole establishments, formica tables, neon strip lights and floor to ceiling mirrors that serve nothing else. No menu required. A huge round tray of the stuff is slammed down in front of you to be cut like an oozing, endlessly elastic pizza. That and the only available drink, tiny glasses of boiled milk so unpleasant you have to down them in one as you would vodka in Russia. The drawback to that being that you're immediately given a second and a third and a fourth. Some say Turkish Kanafa is the best, some say Syrian. It's just one example of how Gaziantep and Aleppo, only two hours drive away across the border to the south, are in many ways part of what's nowadays called a common cultural space. In Ottoman times, they were in the same province. The Old bazaars and mosques with their stripes of dark and pale stone look the same in both cities. Or they did until those in Aleppo were reduced to ruins in Syria's war. A few years ago, before anyone dreamed of an Arab Spring, the glitzy new malls of Gaziantep, one of the Anatolian tiger cities of Turkey's economic boom, were thronged with Syrian day trippers. They would return over the border loaded with shopping. Today, those same cars with battered Aleppo number plates arrive already, loaded with all the family's possessions, and usually never return home. Now there are two Gazianteps. There's the official Turkish one, a busy, confident provincial capital and unseen by many, a secret Syrian city below the surface, a city of refugee families crammed, often three or four to an apartment, of Syrian politicians, Syrian journalists, Syrian professors and students trying to recreate their universities in bedrooms and kitchens. By day, in the street, you might not notice them, but if you could fly over the city by night, counting lights, you'd pinpoint them easily enough for the two Gazianteps keep different hours. The Syrians stay up long after most Turks have gone to bed and sleep later in the morning. They've been talking, talking, talking about the future of their country. And more and more, the world now comes to Gaziantep, this safe, neutral zone just an hour from where the bombs are falling, to talk to them. Gaziantep's become a slightly less glamorous version of what Casablanca was in 1942, a city of intrigue, of clandestine meetings over tiny glasses of hot, sweet tea, where battle weary rebel commanders take time out from the fighting to be sized up by Western diplomats to form and reform alliances, to seek cash for their campaigns from shadowy Kuwaiti and Emirati businessmen. Elsewhere, in the lobbies and conference rooms of its hotels, you'll find international aid agencies planning their strategies for Syria, and democracy workshops funded by foreign governments where for a few days civil society activists from over the border can face not bullets, but bullet points. Role playing, peace building scenarios with plenty of bottled water to hand. But what amid this world of white boards, of capacity building, of well paid consultants, about the slime I remember so vividly now in the freezing dead of winter, melted snow mixes with mud to form a thick liquid layer underfoot that glistens in the lamplight of early evening, not on the well made roads of Gaziantep, but amid the back street potholes of Kilis, the border town that must host the tens of thousands of destitute Syrian refugees who can't afford apartments in the big city. I meet a nine year old girl from Aleppo who braves the slime and snow in plastic sandals. A woman whose 11 year old son must work in cafes all day to earn money for the family to eat. These are the people, ultimately, that the diplomats, the commanders, the consultants are here for, for whom billions are being spent on aid, on conferences, on weapons. The Turks play host as best they can. But as the refugee camps expand inexorably, as the secret life of Gaziantep threatens to overshadow its official business, they're growing nervous. Everyone wants to go back to when Gaziantep and Aleppo simply shared a common architecture and a love of Kanafa. But tragically, it won't be anytime soon.
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And that's Tim Whewell. Russians celebrated Orthodox Christmas earlier this week, but the message from the Kremlin that day was far from festive. President Putin announced he was cancelling leave for tens of thousands of police officers and soldiers so they can provide extra security for the Winter Olympics, which get underway in Sochi next month. The presidential decree came after two suicide bomb attacks in the southern city of Volgograd in December which killed more than 30 people. An exclusion zone will now be set up around the Black Sea resort. There'll be checkpoints and armoured vehicles on the streets. Naval vessels will patrol offshore, and as Lucy Ash has been finding out, they've also drafted in hundreds of Cossack volunteers.
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My heart sank when I saw the thick bean soup followed by mashed potato and goulash. We'd just had breakfast, but Amalia isn't the kind of woman you say no to. Clackety clack. In her high heels and figure hugging denim, Amalia steered us past the bodybuilding gym, past the fountain with the stone mermaid and into the canteen. Now we'll eat, she announced, sitting down and unfolding her napkin. It'll be too busy when the men get back. In the run up to the Sochi Olympics, Amalia's hotel has unusual guests. At dawn they line up in the yard before getting into a fleet of buses to to go out on patrol. They wear army camouflage and lambskin hats with silver crosses. I don't know exactly what they do outside my complex. I think they keep order, said Amalia. Lovely people, very patriotic. The men are Cossacks from all over the Krasnodar region, descendants of the soldiers and border guards who served the tsars. Alexander Tkachov, the pro Putin governor of this swathe of southern Russia, who has Cossack blood himself, has recruited his fellow Cossacks to help police the region's cities. Some are volunteers. Others are on the government payroll. Last September, Tkachev addressed rows of men in traditional uniforms outside the Winter Theatre in downtown Sochi. He told them that the migrant workers who'd come to build stadiums, roads and other infrastructure for the Games were no longer welcome. Their contracts have finished, but they're playing hide and seek with us. We won't allow that. He bellowed. We'll search every home and every building site. So in the last few months, these swashbuckling heroes, famous for their papaja hats and fancy tunics with cartridge loops, have effectively become a deportation militia. Every day, come rain or shine, they go out accompanied by regular police and officers from the Federal Migration Service, conducting house to house searches to catch illegal immigrants. From a discreet distance, I watch how they work, how they slow down when they approach a bus stop and scan the faces of waiting passengers. Anyone who looks foreign, particularly Central Asian, is suspect. Many migrant workers have been sent home even when their contracts were still valid. Some say they've been underpaid. Others claim they've been cheated of several months wages. A frightened young plasterer from Tajikistan said two of his workmates were arrested crossing the road on their way home and later deported. They just shoved them in a car and drove off, he said, sitting on a bunk bed in his makeshift home in a garage. But all their documents were in order. I try not to go outside now I'm scared to walk the streets. Alexander Papkov, a Sochi lawyer who's defended many migrant workers, told me court procedures are routinely violated. 30 or 40 people are often often processed in one session, and hearings last just minutes. I think the record was 50 seconds, he said. How can you possibly find out if someone is here legally or not in that time? Perhaps the Cossack vigilantes are meant to reassure nervous citizens they'll be safe when hundreds of thousands arrive next month for the Winter Olympics. Not long before the bombings in Volgograd, I went to see Dmitry Kozak at the sprawling White House in Moscow. He's a deputy prime minister and the man Putin put in charge of the Games in Sochi. When I pressed him on the many allegations of corruption I'd heard, he seemed briefly ill at ease. His aide looked cross and started hissing in my producer Anastasia's ear that these negative questions had gone way off piste. But Kozak is a smooth operator and quickly slalom through questions about security. Terrorism, he intoned, is a global problem, as much a curse in Boston or London as in Russia will cooperate with any country, regardless of ideological differences, to overcome this evil. The investigation into the Volgograd bombings is still going on. The man suspected of blowing himself up in the railway station is a Russian paramedic. Pavel Pechonkin converted to Islam and joined a group of militants who want to establish a caliphate across the Muslim North Caucasus. The authorities knew he was a security risk. In a heart wrenching video posted on the Internet in March, Pechonkin's parents had pleaded with him not to use violence. Six months later, they travelled to the volatile Russian republic of Dagestan, hardly a day's drive from Sochi, to try to persuade him to come home. But to no avail. In the wake of the slaughter in Volgograd, many Russians wonder whether time and resources might be better spent tracking down terrorists rather than sending the Cossacks after Kazakh carpenters and and Tadgyk Tylers.
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Lucy Asch On Russia's Black Sea coast, archaeologists and historians in Rome have been learning a little more about the life of one of the great emperors, Hadrian. There have been fresh finds at the villa complex he had built on the edge of the city. It's been described as an architectural masterpiece, and Hadrian filled it with some of the most splendid art in the ancient world. Our man there, Alan Johnston, says the significance of the site has long been appreciated, but now a team working on has discovered it's even more impressive than previously thought.
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It lies in the hills just outside Rome, a long rectangular pool of water. It's shaded by pine trees and lined with white marble columns and statues of warriors and maidens. They gazed down on the still waters, which were a strange, yellowy, almost amber colour. And as I looked into them, a large fish emerged slowly from the depths. For a moment he stared back at me, his scales glinting in the sun, then glided away into the murg On a piece of stone out in the middle of the pool, a turtle was sunning himself in this tranquil, beautiful place. The pool was built by the Roman emperor Hadrian, in tribute to the civilization of ancient Egypt. The long stretch of water could be seen as symbolizing the River Nile. And at one end, waterfalls used to tumble through a pavilion where they would cool the Emperor as he lounged on marble benches on hot summer days. The site lies among the ruins of what's known as Hadrian's Villa, a complex of nearly 30 buildings, among them an imperial palace, libraries, temples, theatres and an arena where gladiators fought. Hadrian also filled his villa with some of the finest art in the Roman Empire. Hundreds of statues, mosaics and frescoes. Just imagine this place in its glory days. The home of the most powerful man in the ancient world, ruling and relaxing in his magnificent surroundings. But as he wandered in the space and the calm of his gardens beneath his feet, less fortunate men were leading very different lives. They were slaves and servants who came and went from a sort of underworld below the villa. And the two men who know it best today agreed to show me what they discovered. Slightly confusingly, they were both called Marco and they came equipped with hard hats and torches. They were caving experts, smiling, easy going middle aged modern Romans with a passion for archaeology. And they led me up through an olive grove to the ruins of a pavilion beside it. The two Marcos threw the covers off what looked like a dry well and we clambered down into the earth. In the first silent black chamber, our torches lit shards of smashed marble, pieces of columns that would have once graced the pavilion up above. Then we slid and wriggled through narrow gaps, bodies pressed into the cold, damp clay as we squeezed from one vault into the next. But eventually we emerged into a tunnel that arced high over our heads and ran dead straight into the distance. It was a kind of underground Roman road, wide enough for two chariots to pass one another. This particular buried highway has only recently been explored for the first time, but it's part of a well known network of underground passageways that ran beneath the villa's many buildings. This was the realm of the hundreds of servants who brought supplies, food, drink and firewood to heat rooms and warm baths, all of it rumbling in on carts. And the whole network had to be sunk below ground, so that this clamour wouldn't mar the tranquility of the gardens and temples above, the perfect world dreamed up by Hadrian. But down in the silent darkness on that long lost road, you got a sense of just how much human effort it took to carve out the labyrinth. This was the work of slaves. Many are likely to have begun life as free men in rebellious tribes on faraway frontiers. But they've been captured by Rome's legions, made prisoners of war and condemned to the most grueling kinds of labour. On the walls of the tunnels, you can touch the marks they left as they hacked through the rock, hollowing out the earth for Hadrian. And it could be dangerous work. You can see where one of the passageways had to be abandoned after its floor fell away, collapsing into a deep underground. After emerging from the depths, after climbing back into the sunshine in the olive grove, it was easy to feel that so much of the story of Rome is there to see around you. At the ancient villa above ground, there are those ruins that speak of the power and the splendor of the world, of the emperor, and down below, beneath his libraries and pavilions, traces of the very much harsher lives endured by those consigned to the very bottom of the heap in the Roman Empire.
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Alan Johnston there with an upstairs, downstairs tale from the ancient world. One group that can claim big benefits from the chaos in Syria is the Kurds. They lost out when the British and French carved up the region after the Great War. But today, with the world distracted by events elsewhere in the Middle east, they believe they're closer than ever to achieving an independent Kurdish state. This has been the dream of the Kurdistan workers party, the PKK, for more than 30 years. Today, 40% of this still outlawed guerrilla group are women. Rachel Wright has been to meet some of them in the mountains of northern Iraq.
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We'll have to wait in Erbil for a few days while they check us out, said my Kurdish colleague, who'd done this trip before. But in fact we barely had time to breathe before a driver was sent to collect us. I was a little nervous. It's not every day that you go to stay with a group that NATO, the United States government and the EU all list as a terrorist organization. We drove out of Erbil through countless checkpoints, stopping only to catch some fish for lunch, though to be fair, it was a fish farm. Our destination was a safe house in a small village nestled in the foothills of the Kandoor Mountains, an area completely controlled by the pkk. Our plan was to meet their leader and ask how they see the situation in Syria playing out for the Kurds. But there wasn't a guerrilla in sight. We were shown into a large front room with thin mattresses skirting the walls. After a customary tea was served, my colleague and I lay down and fell asleep. Probably a little unwise given the circumstances. My reverie was shattered when the door burst open and four people in camouflage fatigue strolled in. That was a bit of a shock. A tall man with a moustache introduced himself in near perfect English. His three colleagues were all women. At moments like these, I like to emphasise my Irish heritage always goes down well with dissident groups fighting against oppression. I've never actually lived in Ireland. In fact, I've only visited it once. But hey, it can come in very useful. These four people were the advance party. We were there to meet and interview the PKK leader. No one knew exactly what time she would arrive. Then suddenly she was there. A petite figure in military fatigues, followed by a young woman with a Kalashnikov, her bodyguard. I assumed 40% of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, members are women, and Bessie Hozat is the co leader. The other one is a man. Her eyes lit up when she spoke, and she flushed red when we challenged her. Why was she encouraging young women to take up arms? Women need to fight harder to get freedom, she told us. Men look at us as slaves and sexual objects. For the women of the pkk, the fight is not just for a Kurdish homeland. It's also against the control exerted by Kurdish men in their own villages. Almost as soon as she arrived, she'd gone, and her spokesman Zagros, told me more. At the moment there's a ceasefire with the guerrilla's historic enemies, the Turkish Security Forces. But previously PKK members did not expect to live very long, maybe a year after joining up. And they didn't have relationships at all. At this point, my ears pricked up. At all, you mean never. Zagros had been with the PKK for 13 years. No sex for 13 years. Really? And no alcohol either. He laughed. What do you do for fun? I asked. We study, he said with just a hint of mischief in his eyes. No wonder you've got a PhD, I quipped. He took us to see the graves of many of his young colleagues. Walking down the track were two young women, more like girls, dressed in army fatigues, with rifles dangling from their shoulders. One of them stopped to play with a little puppy, propping her weapon against a wall, an incongruous sight if ever there was one. And then we met Mitra. At 28, she's the commander of an all female brigade that lives somewhere high up in the mountains. Her group had come down to collect their supplies, something they couldn't even have contemplated if there hadn't been a ceasefire. Living high up in the mountains, only venturing out on military operations, they really don't meet many people, but they believe passionately in what they're doing. And no relationships. We are like birds, the spokesman Zagros, had told me. We can't mate until we find a nest. Mitro agreed. You don't think about such things when you're in the mountains, she said. As the women sang by the fire, they played with each other's hair and giggled. If it wasn't for the guns and military fatigues, it could have been a school playground. And for a moment, only a moment, I envied them.
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Rachel Wright. In northern Iraq, an Indian holy man's making another attempt to convince the authorities in Delhi that he knows where a huge hoard of gold is buried in the state of Uttar Pradesh. The information, he says, came to him in a dream. And already there have been weeks of digging. So far, though, there's been no sign at all of the treasure. And Craig Jeffrey, who's been teaching in Uttar Pradesh, says many are now ridiculing the gold rush that never was.
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Dreams are part of our lives. The double helix structure of DNA appeared to the scientist James Watson in a dream. Abraham Lincoln dreamt he was going to be assassinated days before it happened. But what would you do if you dreamt of a secret stash of gold? This is a question I put to students in North India. Most said they'd ignore the dream. If you believed in dreams, said a young man called Lokendra Singh, every day you'd wake up with a Bollywood beauty. Another friend, Ompal Singh, took a different view. No, you must believe dreams can come true. We were talking about this because Shobhan Singh, a holy man in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, recently had an amazing dream. A long dead king Ram Baksh Singh appeared to Shobhan and told him that 1,000 tons of gold were buried beneath Ram Baksh's old fort, which now lies in ruins in Unaw district of Uttar Pradesh. Rambakhsh told Shobhan that the gold should be dug up and used for India's economic development. Shoban decided to take his story to the government. He wrote to the President and Prime Minister. His letters received no reply. Why would the government spend money on a dig just because of one man's dream? But an Indian food and agriculture minister heard Shobhan's story and was intrigued. The Minister instructed the Geological Survey of India to investigate the story. The Geological Survey took soundings and found an anomalous non magnetic zone under the ruins. Put simply, the might be gold. The Archaeological Survey of India started digging accompanied by news vans, armed security and thousands of onlookers. People started rubbing their hands thinking about what they'd do with the gold. Ram Bak Singh's descendants, many of them fallen on hard times, claimed the treasure should belong to them. Locals said the gold should be used for local development. Members of Ram Bak Singh's caste said that the gold should go to them, not to the descendants or the locals. The Archaeological Survey stopped digging. After four weeks of careful searching. The survey team found some rusty iron, some toys, some shards of broken glass. But no gold. But maybe the gold rush will have a silver lining. Some of my student friends say that it's drawn attention to the terrible state of modern Uttar Pradesh. An earnest journalist friend called Tej Pal Singh said, In Uttar Pradesh, 50% of women are malnourished and half the rural low caste population is illiterate. The dig will draw attention to this and policies may begin to change. Other students are less upbeat. Many see the story as a type of morality play. Everyone is chasing gold in modern India, they say. No one anymore is interested in truth or earning through hard work. The gold rush has also become a political matter. The Archaeological Survey of India now refuses to acknowledge that it was actually looking for gold at all. Its spokesmen say that they were simply following up on the report of the geological survey. Media organizations have entered the fray. They've been queuing up to ridicule. What's going on? India Today magazine called the gold rush the Taj Mahal of moronic madness. And politicians have also got in on the act. The Hindu nationalist politician Narendra Modi said that the gold rush had made India a laughing stock. Instead of digging up earth in search of hidden treasure, Modi said the government should try to recover the billions of rupees that politicians have stashed in Swiss bank accounts. But Shobhan Singh is a popular figure. Modi suddenly realized that he was alienating his Hindu support base. Modi rapidly apologized to Shobhan and praised the holy man's work. In the meantime, Shobhan Singh got hold of a mechanical digger and is picking up where the archaeological team left off. The government put a stop to this illegal dig. But still, Shoban won't give up. I'm ready to go to jail, he said. As Mick Jagger once put it, lose your dreams and you will lose your mind.
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And that's it. Craig Jeffrey and that vision of buried treasure, bringing us to the end of another programme. I'll be here again with more from correspondents around the world next Saturday. I hope you'll join us. Goodbye.