← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
A Demo a Day
00:28:08
A passion for protest: street demonstrations, rarely permitted in the days of Mubarak,...
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Hello.
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This is a download of from our own correspondent. We make one edition of the programme for the BBC World Service, but this is the one broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Here to introduce it, Kate Ady.
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Hello. In this programme, how can a country be so friendly and so brutal at the same time? A BBC cameraman on the surreal and the chilling images from the war in Syria. Egyptians and their newfound taste for street protest. Can our man in Cairo find a demo a day to report on? In Equatorial guinea, we meet cross dressing musicians and enjoy a plate of crocodile in chocolate sauce. And beware the fox with a human head. The dangers villagers in the Himalayas face from the ghosts that dwell in the forest. The crisis in Syria seems to be moving into a new and critical phase. This weekend, the Americans announced they'd be giving military aid to the rebels as reports came through of renewed fierce fighting in the country's second city, Alep. Earlier, the United nations had said that 93,000 people had now been killed in the civil war there. Senseless carnage, according to its spokesman, and a terrible reminder of just how vicious this conflict has become. Phil Goodwin is a cameraman who's covered conflicts for the BBC in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and now Syria.
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There are always contrasts in war, but covering Syria, the extremes are bewilderingly surreal. This is one of the most hospitable and friendly places I've ever been to, and one of the most brutal, paranoid and vicious. The surreal journey starts gently at the border with Lebanon. Syria's been on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism since they first made a list in 79. But the first building you come to after duty free is a restaurant beloved of America, a working dunking donuts in Damascus. At a row junction, turn right and you're in the old city. Relaxed families from every background you could name giggle and lick ice cream. Children play in the moss courtyards bathed in deep orange light, the sky full of swirling swifts. Turn left and in 15 minutes you're in an area held by the opposition, with almost no one on the streets. To get to it, you have to walk across a road covered by government snipers. But apparently there's an arrangement with the opposition. If you're not carrying a bag large enough to carry weapons, they won't shoot you. Inside the area are young men, heavily armed, walking with the hunted confidence of the decision they've made to fight the government forces that surround them and could sweep into the area any minute. Go north three hours. Syrian soldiers happily take us to the middle of Kusair, the city they just took back from the opposition a cacophony of soldiers firing bullets in celebration of their major victory. And then they tell me not to film any soldiers. Maybe they're worried I'll film fighters from Lebanon's Hezbollah movement who've now joined the fight against the opposition in Syria and appear to want to stay low profile. Hezbollah fighters try to maintain the illusion they haven't flooded in across the border into the city by saying no pictures while speeding around on motorbikes, holding up sniper rifles, shouting Hezbollah at the top of their voices and coming up and making conversation, saying, guess which country we're from. We take a wrong turn on the way to Kusair and run into a scary checkpoint in the middle of nowhere. A cluster of Syrian soldiers stands around an old man curled in a fetal position below them on the road, cowed in fear, his headdress ripped off, leaving only the two black bands that held it on. The senior soldier breaks off to tell us, we can't go this way. He leans through the window with a face that looks like it hasn't expressed compassion in a very long time. He helpfully gives us directions, emphasizing them with the sheathed knife in his left hand, and turns back to his work. The next morning I'm in the city of Homs, sniffing the air outside a hotel, waiting to go back to Kusair. A voice behind me says, can you name all the countries of the Commonwealth? One of the staff engages me in conversation in broken English. I fail the Commonwealth test, but I do introduce him to the concept of Tonga. How's Homs? I ask. Oh, great, he says. At which moment a huge explosion goes off about a mile away. Saudi Arabia is funding this, he says. And then Prince Charles is no good. He was mean to Lady Dai. In the lobby. UN teams are preparing for the day's missions across the conflict zone. It's the anniversary of the D Day landings. The piped lobby music is the theme from the Holocaust movie Schindler's List. Beyond the surreal, the worst here is the worst that you can imagine happening right now in our time. I've been walked through a massacre site in a village, more than a hundred people slaughtered in their homes and their bodies burned, the Syrian soldier showing us around with an air of helpful apology. It emerges chillingly from everything we can tell, probably knows exactly who did it, a militia supporting their government. But he blames the opposition. In the far north, I filmed the funeral of a young Syrian air force officer, his wife inconsolable, unable to walk on her own his father, no doubt warned by years of state media coverage not to trust foreign journalists, nevertheless embraced me tightly and with great warmth. I ask one of the dead man's friends how Syria can be so friendly and so brutal at the same time. And he pauses and takes a long drag of a cigarette, head bowed, and says, it's religion. There's a beast inside us. Syria has everything to lose, and in so many places it's losing it faster than people can take it all in.
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And that was Phil Goodwin. Islamist groups in Egypt are organizing demonstrations they hope will counter an opposition protest campaign against the rule of the country's Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi. His opponents have a list of grievances they're blaming on his administration. They're angry about his handling of the economy, key job appointments he's made at state institutions, and the nationwide shortages of fuel and electricity. Taking to the streets to protest is a relatively new activity in Egypt. During the rule of former President Mubarak, few public demonstrations were tolerated. Today, though they're so common, our correspondent Alim Maqbool says there's a new one every day of the week.
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Almost immediately, I regretted saying I'd visit a demonstration a day in Cairo. On day one, we'd heard of a protest outside the world famous Egyptian Museum. But by the time we'd navigated the Cairo traffic, the demonstration was over and the Tourism Ministry staff demanding contracts had left. And that, I thought, was that for our short lived project in this city, though I needn't have been so despondent. Driving back, we happened to pass a small gathering outside the Arab League building. We're just about to get started, they told us. They unfurled their banners by the road and started chanting their opposition to the Euro under 21 football tournament being held in Israel. Reporters started arriving and in the end far outnumbered the demonstrators. We were on our way. And we heard of another demo too. Customs officers at Cairo airport had gone on strike, refusing to check baggage until working conditions improved. Day two started with more reports of protests at the airport, but this time it was all the other staff upset. The customs officers had now managed to get a better deal, but that they hadn't. Fifteen people were sacked for blocking the Runway. We headed to a more high profile protest in the center of the city. A small group of people had gathered outside the court to demand the release of an activist who'd been convicted of insulting the President. He'd appeared on a TV show calling President Morsi a murderer for the killings of protesters at anti government demonstrations. Those Types of protests are the ones the world gets to see. Violence, tear gas, rock throwing, sometimes death. But this newfound Egyptian trait of taking to the streets is about much more than that. On a previous Stint here in 2006, I remember going to a small demo against the then president Hosni Mubarak. It must have lasted no more than five minutes before the notorious hired thugs piled in to beat the protesters. Demonstration over since the revolution, and after so many people gave their lives in winning their right to express themselves when they feel oppressed, Egyptians are now far less tolerant of being told to keep quiet, whatever the issue. We saw an illustration of that on day three. Residents of poor areas of Cairo awaiting housing documents from the Governor's office decided they'd had enough of the slow pace of bureaucracy. They protested outside the governor's office, then stormed the building. On the same day, teachers in southern Cairo were threatening to stop exam papers reaching their school in if they didn't get permanent contracts first. On Friday after prayers, we saw a few thousand people gather outside a mosque in a Palestinian solidarity demo as the protesters marched the short distance to Cairo's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Traffic was blocked throughout the area, but we saw no fuss from the drivers. This is just how it is now. Some demos have even become semi permanent. On day five, we visited a group of people beginning their 104th consecutive day of protest outside the Interior Ministry. Inside his tent, Captain Waleed Hosni told us he was a police officer demanding that he be allowed to keep a beard, something the police are not allowed in Egypt at the moment. And it seems no segment of society is left out. On my walk home from the office on day six, in the well to do Zamalik neighborhood, I wandered through a very Zamalik Protestant, well dressed demonstrators, actors, writers, intellectuals. I even spotted a few toy dogs and at least one hired dog walker. Muerta Zasala, an actress, told me it was about the ruling Muslim Brotherhood's opposition to the arts. We're here to say we own the culture, not any government, she said. They can't tell us what to act or sing or dance or publish. Our stage is there on the street. I thought we'd fall at the final hurdle when on day seven, we hadn't managed to get to a protest. But then a group of elderly people decided to occupy the island. In the center of Talat Harab Square in downtown Cairo, demanding a rise in their pensions. An 80 year old man told me he wasn't going to stop protesting until it happened. So is all of This a sign of a sick society with all its ills, and there are certainly many of them finally being exposed. Or is it rather a very healthy new aspect of Egyptian life? I have to say this week has given me a sense of admiration for those making their voices heard on issues they feel passionately about. I suspect many Egyptians will be proud at the suggestion theirs has become one of the protest capitals of the world and that never again will they want to give up their right to take to the streets.
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Alim Maqbool in Cairo, A meeting took place at the international airport at Detroit yesterday which could prove to be one of the most important milestones ever in the history of this famous American city. It was a gathering of creditors and others trying to establish the precise size of the city's debts and it was billed as Detroit's very last chance to avoid bankruptcy. Johnny diamond says that if the Motor City fails to dodge what's known as Chapter 9 bankruptcy, it'll have implications for debt ridden cities across the us. But in Detroit itself, a chronic cash shortage has already left its mark.
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The fire station has seen Detroit's rise and fall. For almost 90 years it has stood in the city's east side, built when Detroit had already begun its climb to dizzying prosperity. Witness to the long post war decline, to the riots that saw Detroit burn and to the departure of many of its jobs and much of its hard working middle class. The fire station now stands in one of Motor City's many crumbling neighbourhoods. Across the way, waist high grass grows untended. A long closed supermarket is covered with graffiti, its awning torn and hanging at a crazy angle. A smell of herbs comes from inside the station. Dinner is being cooked for the 12 man company. The station was built from stone, each fire engine's number carved above one of the three engine wide entrances. The station chief stands outside on a warm early summer's evening. Every now and then a car rolls past. He remembers his first job not far from his home, down one of the mighty avenues, then clogged with vehicles that run the length of the huge city. But that was another age, before the fall. Now the avenues are largely empty during the day and in the evening the traffic lights stand guard over vacant junctions. The chief has brown close cropped hair, a pepper and salt moustache, a round face, a full belly, a quick smile. He's wearing a blue T shirt and heavy blue trousers. His hair is grey at the edges. He will retire next year after 36 years of dashing to fires across the city. We go into buildings he said, and grapple with the devil. Sometimes they'd been met with applause from the neighbours, sometimes with bricks. There used to be a night. Devil's Night it was called every year in Detroit when in an orgy of arson and vandalism, buildings were burned across the city. And fire engines raced back and forth, trying to push back the flaming tide of destruction. Fire crews from around the world came to the city to learn from the experiences of its firefighters. No one knew more about fires. Devil's Night is no more. But the chief and his men are busy enough. Setting light to one of the nearly 80,000 vacant properties in Detroit remains a city sport. Blackened hulks in every neighborhood bear witness to its continuing popularity. The Chief has lived in three different city neighborhoods, seeing each one fall, moving each time to escape the rotation. The pattern has been repeated across the hundred and forty square miles of Detroit. A property stands empty, then another. A building is burned or used by criminals. And the rush begins to get out so as not to be the last ones left in a blighted street. Eventually the council was forced to lift the rule that made firefighters live within the city they served. The chief and his entire company moved out. The chief walks around his station. The walls are tiled, the floors uneven. Near each engine stands a pair of boots bound around by overalls and braces. The whole rig ready to be stepped into at a moment's notice. Black and white photos cover one wall, reminders of blazes from long ago. Upstairs, huge noisy fans do battle with the heat in the company's dormitory. Downtown, there's now an economic revival. Money is coming back into the business district. Smart new offices are springing up. Glass and steel, climate controlled places with flat screen televisions and table tennis tables where they believe in encouraging creativity and lateral thinking. But there's no money for anything like that in the public sector. The police headquarters is a dark stone fortress, scuffed lino and 30 year old furniture within. And there's no money for any new recruits. All the firefighters bar one and middle aged or more. The Chief walks into his office. Clipboards and checklists line one wall. An old TV sits opposite his desk, a washed out colour screen flickering away. He has his own bedroom and a small bathroom, a nod to his seniority. It's barebones stuff in a worn out building. You spend more time with these guys than you do with your own family, he says. He'll miss the job. A job that meant he could put his three children through college. And he'll miss the company. These guys are the best in the world, he says as he heads towards dinner with them all. I love it here. It's my home.
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Johnny diamond in Detroit Equatorial guinea is not high on most people's list of places they'd like to visit. It may be one of Africa's largest oil producers, but the wealth that has produced has hardly trickled down to the poor. The president is not keen on opposition, corruption's said to be rampant, and the country's human rights record is one of the worst in the world. The Radio 3 producer Peter Meanwell, who's just back from there, says that while Equatorial guinea is not exactly geared up for tourism, his visit there was certainly interesting and colorful.
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An almond falls on my head and before I can find it, a little boy in Superman underpants rushes across the packed dirt like a Wimbledon ball. Boy squirrels it away under his armpit. I'm in a poor barrio or neighbourhood in Malabo. Dirt alleys run between the wooden and concrete block buildings, and we're overlooking a river from our makeshift bar as strains of a Congolese sound system float on the humid air. It is Sunday afternoon and under a canopy of mango and almond trees, a group of musicians are playing and singing the music of their little island, annabon, which is 400 miles from here. They sing a bit of a song called Daj. The lyrics have to be rude, they tell me, and when you do it for real, everyone cross dresses. The men wear stuffed bras and wigs, the women paint on moustaches. The complete Daj, though, is only performed twice in your life, once when you marry and then again when your husband or wife dies. And the cross dressing. The Annabonese believe that when you marry you become one, and because you can't swap bodies physically, you swap clothes for the dance. It's somewhat ironic that this barrio is called numbili, meaning new building in the pidgin English. That's an unofficial lingua franca. In Equatorial Guinea's capital, only minutes away, you can drive down an almost deserted, spotless six lane highway past identicate pastel coloured cubes of embassies, international corporations and business hotels wondering where all the people are. In Equatorial guinea, oil money is introducing the new next to the old. And in a country with a multitude of ethnicities and a difficult history pre and post independence from Spain, preserving old cultural identities seems crucially important. Malabo is on the island which was once known as Fernando Po. It's more than 100 miles from the continental portion of the country, which is squeezed in between Cameroon and Gabon. There the Newly built roads are fringed with verdant primary forests edged in bright red earth. But in order to pass unhindered through the many military checkpoints that dot the highways, we had to add a Ministry of Culture minder to our party, never really sure whether he was there to look after us or keep an eye on us. As regular as the checkpoints, makeshift roadside stalls were strung with smoked armadillo and porcupine, and alongside brightly coloured chilies and rotund pineapples, there were also hand drawn signs in neat Mandarin catering for the growing Chinese community of workers digging ditches, building roads and bridges for the new oil funded infrastructure. Along a less developed road in the tiny village of Ebian, we met one of the few remaining players of an ancient musical instrument called the invet. He's Stanislav Bengono Nvo, a man of indeterminate but considerable age, surrounded by eight other villages. Bengono, who was wearing monkey skins and carrying a carved ancestral totem, wielded his bo zither, its four strings cut from the same piece of bamboo that forms its back, as he strummed, gesticulated and strutted his tail, something to do with a man with four wives. He had everyone in the village spellbound, transported back to another time. This sense of timelessness was interrupted only by the roar of huge logging trucks emerging from the forest, driven by more Chinese workers and loaded with gargantuan trunks. We called in at a place called Ebbibi Inn. Its grand hotel boasted a marble lined lobby and larger than life portraits of the president. The town had little electricity at night, but in a small restaurant, generator whirring out back, we tucked into the local speciality of crocodile in a chocolate sauce. Our congenial waiter, it turned out, was on a break from his job at the local hospital. As he brought over some pineapple for dessert, he spoke of the need for more locally trained medical professionals and sighed as he explained his efforts to teach villagers solutions to emergency health problems. On our way back to the hotel, we were pulled over at another roadblock. An aggressive young soldier with a thrusting automatic weapon barked at us for our passports and papers. And as our guide, who was still trying to save on her mobile the phone number of the restaurant we'd been in, absentmindedly handed them over. Our interrogator started laughing. Why are you saving the number of a restaurant? Does that mean you want to come back to Ebibi Inn? He smiled, lowered his weapon and waved us on our way.
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Peter Meanwell. And if you go to BBC online, you can hear the two World Roots programs which he's made for Radio 3 in Equatorial guinea, and see some fine pictures too. Spooky apparitions, evil spirits, out of body experiences. There's nothing like a good ghost story to send shivers down your spine. Yet for some spiritual possession, where your body's taken over by demons, gods or extraterrestrials is very much a part of everyday life. The concept exists in many religions, including Christianity, Buddhism, and in a variety of Asian and African traditions. In the Indian Himalayas, some spirits are regarded as relatively benign. Others, though, are downright evil. And that can prove a serious problem, as Jane Dyson and her young family have been discovering.
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I'm crouching in the doorway of a tiny but crowded shop high in the Indian Himalayas. I'm in the village of Bemni with my husband and two children, where I'm doing anthropological research on social change. Out of nowhere, the shopkeeper's dog bounds up and begins barking ferociously at Finn, my four year old son. The dog is a huge Tibetan mastiff whose nighttime job is to protect the village goats from leopards. Finn, who's barely taller than the dog, is terrified and begins to scream. While I try to console Finn, the shopkeeper disappears inside and returns with a very old woman. She heads straight for Finn, cradling some ash in her hands. Finn's eyes widen further as she begins to circle the ash over his head. She chants in a low voice and blows into his hair. It suddenly dawns on me what she is doing. She thinks he was screaming because he is possessed. So now she is exorcising the evil spirit from my son's body. Finn is transfixed and his crying gently subsides. Eventually, the shopkeeper looks at me and silently tilts his head. All that's needed to say that it's done, finished, that now all will be well. There's a murmur of approval from the assembled crowd and we continue with our day. Spirit possession is a big issue in Bemni. There are times when villagers expect to be possessed at weddings or specially organized pujas, religious ceremonies. Then the spirit of an ancestor may enter the body of a person, usually in moments of extreme emotion, say when a daughter is being prepared to be given away in a marriage ceremony. The person possessed may cry, shake uncontrollably, flinging their arms around, beating their chest. This is part of village culture and it never arouses anxiety. The possessed person quickly recovers to carry on with the rest of the ritual. There's also the casual incidents of possession A child is playing up or a teenager is unusually moody, the parent may call on an elder or priest to remove the bad spirit from the body. This possession can be quite low level and continue for some time. Some young people seem to use it as an excuse. I used to be a hard worker at school, they say, but then I was possessed. But what worries villagers more is to be taken over by an evil spirit, one of the ghosts that dwell in the forest. They believe these spirits can make them ill or even kill them. One winter evening four years ago, Mohan Singh met one such ghost. He was fetching wood in the forest when a strange man approached him and asked, why are you cutting that tree? Mohan said that the sky suddenly went black, as if he had been struck partially blind. The man grabbed at Mohan's shirt across his chest. The heel of the ghost's hand was on one side of Mohan's body, and the fingertips reached right across to the other side. The ghost's hair fell to his waist and was as thick as a child's arm. Mohan fought for his life. During the tussle, the ghost changed in size. One minute, nine feet tall, the next the size of a chicken. Mohan eventually broke free of the ghost, who instantly vanished. But he returned home with a high fever. I was possessed by that spirit, Mohan recalled. He only recovered once. He had slaughtered a goat in a special ceremony arranged by a priest. Such meetings are not uncommon. Our neighbour in the village once encountered a fox with a human head. Others tell of talking snakes guarding pots of gold. While the village itself is protected from ghosts by its many temples, the surrounding forests are full of danger. If someone is out late working in the forest, people quickly start to worry that they have met a ghost. Villagers say that ghosts only possess those who are already anxious and vulnerable, and that is why they are now so worried for their children. People in Bemni are concerned about their future. Climate change and the village's isolation make it near impossible to make money from the land. Unemployment is a huge problem, and people talk about feeling tension like never before. It seems that a rise in modern anxiety in the village may be making people more susceptible to possession. Some educated young people only cautiously admit that they believe in ghosts. One young woman told me, I don't believe I will ever see one, but I have seen what they can do to you. Whatever the truth, the fear of ghosts is real enough. And one thing's for sure. Now when my children cry, it's given a whole new meaning to asking, what has got into you?
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High spirits in the Himalayas Jane Dyson there, ending this edition. I'll be here on Thursday and Saturday of next week with more from our own correspondence. I hope you'll join us then. Goodbye.