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From Our Own Correspondent
A Doomed Romance
00:27:48
A love affair going nowhere in Damascus -- it's what happens when a rebel footsoldier...
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- [00:00]
Kate Adie
Hello from the. From our own correspondence studios at Broadcasting House in London, you've downloaded the latest edition of the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
- [00:12]
Narrator/Presenter
Hello. Today, a doomed love affair between a man and a woman on opposing sides of the warring divide in Syria. Hands off our calypso. The Caribbean musicians who say their government's determined to silence their music. We're in Kazakhstan, free now from the shackles of communism, only to suffer an identity cris and face to face with the most exquisite Chinese banquet ever. 40 mouth watering dishes and not one of them is edible. But first, the political drama in Ukraine shows no sign of coming to an early end. Already this week, the Prime Minister has announced his resignation and the government has repealed the anti protest laws which led to violence earlier this month. And last night the parliament approved a law granting an amnesty to those detained. During weeks of anti government protests, opposition parties refused to back the bill, which stipulates that demonstrators must remove barricades in the centre of the capital, Kiev, and leave the government buildings they occupy within 15 days. Gabriel Gatehouse has spent the last few days with the protesters who are still on the streets of the capital and say they won't go until the President has resigned.
- [01:22]
Gabriel Gatehouse
At first I thought perhaps I'd stumbled into some sort of historical theme park. A burly man in Cossack garb, white tunic, astrakhan cap, a bullet belt slung across his chest and was stoking a wood burning stove. His jaw was set in an attitude of grim determination as he waited for his tin kettle to boil. Frost settled on his fulsome drooping moustache. Day and night, battle cries echo around Kiev's Independence Square in a well practiced call and response routine. First a single voice rings out. Slava. Ukraine. Glory to Ukraine. Heroim Slava. Intoned the crowd. Glory to our heroes. Those words were the slogan of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a nationalist outfit that had fought a doomed guerrilla war against the Soviet government in western Ukraine in the 1940s and 50s. Today their black and red flags flutter from green canvas tents right in the center of the city. What had been a peaceful protest camp has become a sort of medieval fortress prepared for a fight. Gangs of men and women shovel snow into sacks. They pile them up and then pour water over them, forming impenetrable walls of ice around the square. For weaponry, the protesters rely on ingenuity. We saw a group of men transforming a car trailer into a catapult. An Orthodox priest stood by offering advice as well as prayers. Some have fashioned clubs out of firewood and body armor from rubber matting, held in place with sticky tape. Others wander around wearing motorcycle helmets and wielding baseball bats, gas masks slung around their necks. Kiev looks and feels like some surreal parallel universe where an idealized, heroic past has collided with a menacing dystopian future. But this is real. The cold is certainly real. At night the temperature drops to below minus 20, and as you breathe out you can feel icicles forming in your nostrils. People huddle round bonfires to keep warm and volunteers circulate with cardboard boxes full of ham and cheese sandwiches or steaming urns of tea. Every night, Raman, a former engineer from Western Ukraine, cooks up a vast vat of borscht right here on the central square to be distributed for free to the cold and the hungry. Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come, he told me, his eyes streaming from the wood smoke. I'll be here till the bitter end. The front line consists of a mountain of car tires piled up across the cobbled street that leads towards the parliament building. Nestled amongst the tyres we saw hundreds of bottles, each filled with petrol, a rag stuffed in the top, Molotov cocktails at the ready. When I arrived last week, there was an uneasy truce in force between the demonstrators and the riot police facing off just metres apart. Occasionally, a handful of protesters would climb atop the burnt out, frozen shell of a bus and shout across the expanse of ice covered cobblestones. Out with the thieves, out with the bandits. They chanted, referring to the politicians in the government offices. Behind, the police were silent like a phalanx of Roman legionaries, impassive behind their riot shields. This isn't about Europe or Russia, one young man said from behind a scarf and hood that revealed only his eyes. I just want to live in a normal country, he said. I asked him what he meant by normal country. He told me about the three shops he'd set up with his own money. He wanted to be a responsible citizen and pay his taxes. But to register to pay tax, he told me, you have to pay bribes. And under this government the bribes just keep getting bigger and bigger. In the end he couldn't afford it and he closed his business down. Now he's taken a job in someone else's shop to provide for his two year old daughter. The protesters are an odd mix. Some are human rights campaigners, some are far right activists. Many are simply middle class Ukrainians who fear for the future of their children. But in answer to the question, why are you here? Nearly all tell the same story. They speak of A kleptocratic administration that's out of control. Certainly the government has lost control of the center of its own capital. In some provincial towns, the demonstrators have seized local government offices too. But the opposition leaders who claim to represent the protesters don't really control the mob either. As darkness fell on Friday, the truce was at an end. The tires were doused in petrol and satellite forming a blazing wall of fire. Masked men wheeled out the catapult and fired cobblestones. Through the smoke and haze, Molotov cocktails flickered like fireflies through the air. In return, the police threw stun grenades and turned on the hoses, trying in vain to put out the fire. The fighting flares up periodically and then dies down again. The opposition crosses the lines for talks. The government makes concessions. But so far nothing, it seems, can dislodge the protesters.
- [06:32]
Narrator/Presenter
Gabriel Gatehouse In Ukraine, the United nations mediator Lakhta Brahimi says he doesn't expect there to be any substantial progress during the current round of Syria Syrian peace talks, which end tomorrow. Mr. Brahimi said the ice had started to thaw between the delegations from the Syrian government and the opposition, though the gap between the two was still, as he put it, quite large. He said there had been no progress on negotiations to deliver aid to civilians under siege in the city of Homs Damascus, the capital, remains a divided city. Parts of it are under the control of government forces. Other areas are held by the rebels. But some people have connections on both sides of the divide. Abigail Fielding Smith has been talking to one man with a serious case of conflicted loyalties.
- [07:20]
Abigail Fielding Smith
The labourer was like most young Syrian men you meet these tough, sardonic and old beyond his years. We met in a busy street in central Damascus. From its tree fringed cafes you could hear the thud of shells hitting the rebel controlled suburbs. He was from one of the towns under bombardment and his family was still trapped there. He'd been explaining without much emotion how hard it was to get supplies through the checkpoints surrounding it. As we talked, he flicked constant glances at the people around us from under his thick eyelashes. We were in a government controlled area full of smartly dressed shoppers and ponderous traffic police. Though we weren't doing anything wrong, Life under the eye of Syria's feared Muhabarat intelligence services leaves its mark on people. He asked me not to use his real name. I'll call him Abu Anas. At one point, he started looking through his phone to show me a photo. When people from opposition areas in Syria hand you their phones, you brace yourself for gruesome images of people wounded in government air raids. Abu Anas, however, had something different to show. He produced a picture of a doe eyed young woman in a sparkly top and skinny jeans. It turned out that this streetwise son of the rebel suburbs had fallen in love. Unfortunately for him, it was with the daughter of a senior Muhabarat official. I'm in a mess, he sighed, suddenly seeming much closer to his real age. I hate the regime, but I love a daughter of the regime. He'd met her by chance before the uprising broke out and has spoken to her on the phone almost every day since then throughout the protests and the bombs. Like many people in his hometown, Abu Anas supported the uprising when it first started, but that didn't stop him pursuing the Mukhabarat official's daughter. I made a clear distinction between my relationship with her and my relationship with the government, he explained. None of his friends in the local rebel outfits knew about his girlfriend. If they did, they might suspect him of being an informant. The girl's father was furious when he found out about the relationship, but still has no idea the working class man who stole his daughter's heart has links with the rebellion. I kept which side I'm on unknown, he boasted, chuckling at his own audacity in slipping between the two worlds. It is not only star crossed lovers who lead double lives in today's Damascus, a knot of checkpoints separates the largely undamaged centre of the city from the shell blasted suburbs under rebel control. But this doesn't mean that everyone on one side supports the government and the other the opposition. As the war drags on, many find it pays to be flexible. The rebel held areas are teeming with paid informants who pass information back to the government. On the city's southern front line, a loyalist fighter told me that the government knew the names of everyone who had taken up arms against them. On the other side. They know exactly who is involved and who is not involved. We have informers in their community like they have in ours, he explained. The harried looking soldiers and militiamen at government checkpoints can also be bribed, Abu Anas told me, although in some places they are imposing a tight siege, causing acute hunger. In others they've grown rich by accepting money from smugglers. Some officers used to just have enough money for food, abu Anas said. Now they've got cars, they're getting married. They're making progress in their lives. A note of envy crept into his voice as he spoke. At this point he was more interested in getting on in life than with the revolution. He felt completely disillusioned with it. He'd moved out of the suburbs before the siege there tightened and was trying to earn a living in the city centre. He tried to put the girl behind him too. He couldn't see how they'd ever be able to get married. But when he tried to break it off, he found he couldn't bear it. A doomed love affair between two people from warring communities doesn't exactly provide hope for Syria. The conflict here looks more entrenched than ever, but for Abu Anas, it seems to offer some respite from a life that has grown unremittingly hard and bleak. It's not often you find someone who adores you that much, he said. It's a wonderful story, but it's full of conflict.
- [11:31]
Narrator/Presenter
And that's Abigail Fielding Smith Musicians in the South American state of Guyana say their government's attempting to silence their traditional calypso songs, trying to make sure they don't get played on the radio. Calypsonians in Guyana, which won independence from Britain in the 1960s, often sing about corruption in high places and the political tensions in this Caribbean nation. Yet Girish Gupta says it isn't just a dispute between musicians and politicians. It highlights a long standing rivalry between the country's two main ethnic groups.
- [12:03]
Kate Adie
I'm watching a computer screen in the offices of Guyana State radio station. A man dressed in a bright yellow hat, wearing garish green shirt and oversized red tie is dancing on stage, his waist length dreadlocks following behind. I'm here under the gaze of the station's most senior staff. We're watching the professor, a Guyanese singer songwriter who last year won this Caribbean nation's annual calypso competition. The 43 year old's winning song, God Na Sleep, talks of the corruption that's endemic in this tiny English speaking country perched on the shoulder of of Latin America. Despite winning the calypso competition, the song didn't impress the government Minister for Transport and Hydraulics, Robson Benn. In fact, it so angered him, the staff here tell me that he stormed into these very offices soon after it was played and demanded that it be banned along with an array of other calypsos. The professor makes his living working as a bauxite miner on the Burbase river in the jungles of Guyana's Region 10. Calypso stifled in Guyana because it speaks the truth, he told me. People love the song because it's real spicy and that's what Calypso is all about. The only people, he said, that get vexed by my music are those in government. The authorities are accused of repressing the politically charged music by keeping it off the air. The dispute's much bigger than a row between a dreadlocked singer and an overzealous minister, though it piggybacks on decades old ethnic tensions between two groups that have battled for power here for half a century. Independence from British rule came in 1966. The country's history since then has been punctuated by corruption, assassinations and a battle between two ethnically based political parties. One is made up primarily of African descended supporters and held power for nearly three decades until 1992. The other, in power now is made up by the descendants of indentured Indian servants. I met those in government now at a drinks party hosted by the Brazilian ambassador in Guyana's capital, Georgetown. Sipping a glass of wine, Minister Ben told me what he thought of the professor's song and others like it. He called them slanderous, vulgar and naked political assaults. He did admit storming into the station to complain, but denied that he'd instructed anyone to ban the songs, though he added, some shouldn't be played. Guyana's president Donald Ramatar was also at the event on a humid evening. He was dressed in a loose fitting white shirt and told me that calypso was an important part of Guyanese culture. Art and culture here are blossoming, he said, more than at any other time since independence. David Hindes is a political activist here. I met him in his office in Georgetown, the mid afternoon heat winning its battle against a struggling fan. In the corner of the room. He told me that under the current administration the calypsos have increasingly come under assault. Senior staff members at the state radio station deny that any ban on playing calypso is in effect, though it's rare to hear the music on air. It's not only the professor who said he suffered at the hands of censors. Raz Marcus lives in what can loosely be described as a tree house behind a gold and diamond dealers shop in Georgetown. Clad in a colorful vest, sunglasses and denim shorts, the 45 year old told me that his lyrics are often censored. Marcus could talk for hours, punctuating his rambling with his own calypso songs. One exemplified the genre's use of double entendres. Go for cup ostensibly promotes the governing party here, identified by its symbol, the cup. The song plays on an obscenity and describes the party's mistakes. I was told I used indecent language, he said as he lifted a nearby cup. I was talking about this cup, the symbol of the party. I was advising people to go for the cup. I later drove across the Demerara river that splits Georgetown in two. On its western bank, among sugarcane fields, lives mighty Rebel, the head of the country's Calypso association. I had no idea of his address, but all I needed to do was stick my head out of the window and ask where the rebel lived. I stopped outside a rudimentary house on the main road. As people rode their bicycles through the evening heat. We walked among the palm trees, across a small stream and into the fields. There, the 67 year old explained the importance of calypso music. We're the mouthpiece of the people, he told me. The government needs to give us a break and let us sing.
- [16:31]
Narrator/Presenter
Girish Gupta in Guyana People in Kazakhstan, that vast expanse of a country just south of Russia, have lived through some sweeping changes over the centuries. Across its vast steppes have rolled the hordes of Genghis Khan and the armies of the tsars in the 18th and 19th centuries. More recently, Soviet communism came and then went through it all. Many Kazakhs, when it comes to solving some of life's eternal problems, have relied upon their traditional healers. During the Soviet period, when any sign of religion was deplored as superstitious and backward city Kazakhs might have kept their beliefs under wraps, sneaking out only occasionally to the holy villages for a discreet consultation. But Caroline Eden in the city of Almaty has been finding out that now, like many other rural migrants, the shamans are coming back to to head north
- [17:21]
Caroline Eden
on Almety's Pushkin street is to pass through an invisible curtain. Left behind are the Bentley showrooms and neatly swept pavement cafes of the grander areas. Instead, pockmarked Pushkin street appears well trodden, dust choked and hard. Up in front of a peeling apartment block, dozens of life size mannequins have been dressed in counterfeit polyester tracksuits. Their vendors squat below, hovering over cheap frilly underwear, also for sale. On the opposite side of the road, amongst the travel agencies which arrange hajj pilgrimages to Mecca for practicing Muslims, more stands have been set up intended for the faithful heading to Friday prayers. Boxes of miswak, teeth cleaning twigs made from the arak tree used for sweetening breath, and small bottles of perfume sit next to neat piles of religious paperbacks. Behind them, Almaty's mosque sits squat and proud, lit by a watery autumn sun. On its south facing wall, a sign illustrates suitable clothing for visitors. A red cross has been painted through a cartoon woman dressed in a clingy T shirt and skirt, a tick over the one in a hijab and long sleeves. Such signs are deemed necessary for a population still adjusting from seven decades of atheist communist rule. A few metres away, in a scruffy square, the newly arrived sit and chat. Recognisable by their heavy leather jackets and flat leather caps, they are the wandering herdsmen from remote corners of Kazakhstan who have come seeking their fortune. They're just a handful of the thousands of villagers who have largely replaced ethnic Russians in Almaty since the fall of the Soviet Union. It is there that I meet Jack Sigle, an elderly woman in a neat headscarf who has also just arrived. Patting a tiny stool, she instructs me to sit. In front of us, there is a bone handled horsewhip, a bushy sprig of juniper and some glossy white seeds that have been artfully displayed in the shape of a heart. She's not selling the items, she tells me, but is using them to offer guidance. Jaxigor is a baksi, or shaman, and is typical in that she is old and female. Like many of the 3,000 or so healers in Almaty, she hails from the southern desert city of Turkestan, which lies 20 hours away by bush. Once, Jaksukul says, people from Almaty would travel to my city to meet me. Now they're all too busy making money and working in offices, so instead I have come to them, offering quick fixes to complex issues. Shamas have a long history in Kazakhstan. Sufism, the name given to Islamic mysticism, is mixed with old religious practices. Most healers communicate with their spiritual ancestors in order to heal, rid houses of malicious vibes and foretell the future. Even Kazakh businessmen, who have become very rich very quickly, visit me. Jack Segal says strategy is not enough. They want to know what the future holds and if anyone threatens their riches. Bent and almost toothless, she tells me that under Soviet rule, when the work of healers was publicly and practically wiped out, she worked as a high school teacher. Now, at 75, an age when many retire, Jacques labours every day. She doesn't charge money for her service, but takes donations for the advice she gives out and the remedies she offers to the sick. Sometimes, she tells me, she plays the kibiz, a sacred stringed instrument which is believed to banish evil spirits. I ask her if it's hard coming to a city to start a new life at her age. She considers this for a moment but ignores the question and instead proudly tells me that her son is a newly qualified teacher who speaks seven languages. Just as I straighten and stand to leave, a local man chips in, eager to give his view. He's visibly devout, sporting a skull cap and a long beard, a rare sight in modern Almaty. This witchcraft is back in vogue, he says seriously. They shouldn't be here by the mosque. I blame the poor standard of education we have nowadays. Otherwise, surely, no one would believe the things these shamans say. Freed from the shackles of sanitized communism, Kazakhstan is a country with an identity crisis. Resource rich Kazakhs chase petro dollars while others look to Mohammad or even Marx for guidance. It is perhaps no wonder that many are returning to their earliest beliefs, the cults of their ancestors, to which only the shamans hold the key.
- [21:48]
Narrator/Presenter
Caroline Eden the Chinese have always been obsessed with food. Their rich culinary culture, however, has often been taken for granted. But the last couple of years have seen a sudden surge in interest after the screening of an encyclopaedic television series about Chinese cuisine called A Bite of China. The new fashion for food culture has seen a boom in the publication of gastronomic memoirs and cookbooks, and Fuchsia Dunlop in the eastern city of Hangzhou tells us it's also led to the opening of food museum gems in a number of Chinese cities.
- [22:22]
Fuchsia Dunlop
I'm gazing at what must be the most exquisite banquet I've ever seen. The round table is set with more than 40 dishes, including legendary delicacies such as a whole bear's paw surrounded by the tongues of little fish and bird's nest soup. It all looks so appetising, but unfortunately, none of it is edible. This gorgeous spread, rotating slowly before my eyes, is made from painted plastic. It's a museum reconstruction of dishes from the most famous meal in Chinese history, the Man Han banquet of the Qing Dynasty court, which is said to have represented the pinnacle of the culinary skills of the Han Chinese and their Manchu conquerors. The museum in the eastern city of Hangzhou is one of a growing number of food museums in China, but it's probably the most magnificent. It occupies a large site in the scenic hills on the outskirts of town and was built at a cost of some £20 million. When you enter, it seems at first like a more conventional museum, with glass cabinets displaying ancient pots and excavated grains of millet and rice. It's afterwards that the real fun begins. There are costumed figures depicting scenes from local food history and a touchscreen game where you can Answer a quiz on the finer points of cooking. One of Hangzhou's most famous dishes, Dongpo Pork. Above all, there are literally hundreds of realistic, life sized models of mouth watering food. I feast my eyes on replicas of Buddhist vegetarian dishes and the delicate sweet pastries made in Hangzhou during the Song dynasty 800 years ago. There's a whole cabinet filled with different kinds of zongzi, the leaf wrapped rice parcels eaten at the Dragon Boat Festival each spring. And if you ever wanted to know what a diplomat visiting hangzhou in the 12th century might have had for dinner, it's all here in front of you. A table of some 30 dishes, including wine, pickled crab and smoked rabbit. Every delicacy is presented in a vessel appropriate to its historical period and referenced to a classic text. The man behind this labor of Love is veteran MasterChef Hu Zhongying. He and his team spent two years researching the dishes and six months working with the kind of food technicians who make models of sushi for Japanese restaurants. They cooked every recipe, photographed the dishes, and then used them to make molds which were then cast and painted. You'll be glad to hear that they didn't use real Bears Paw for the Manhan banquet centrepiece. A notice reminds visitors that the museum does not support the consumption of endangered species. What's most remarkable about this glittering temple to Chinese gastronomy is that it's not even a provincial food museum, let alone a national one. It's dedicated to the cuisine of a single Chinese city. But then, Hangzhou is a special case with an unusually rich culinary history. In the 12th century, the song Dynasty court fled here after being driven south by barbarian invaders, and the city became known for its lively nightlife and delicious food. Famous gourmets have flocked here over the centuries, and there are intriguing legends behind many local dishes. These days, although the Chinese seem to be waking up to the glories of their culinary culture, many chefs are concerned about a decline in popular cooking skills. The museum's manager, Wu Xiongxin, says he and his colleagues hope their work will help to preserve traditional skills. They run cooking classes for local people, street food fairs, and days for children to learn how to make tofu and pickled vegetables. Most local people, he tells me, say they hadn't realized there was so much culture behind their food. As you can imagine, visiting such a museum does make the stomach rumble. But there's no need to panic, because just beyond the galleries, there's a huge restaurant where you can actually eat many of the classic dishes from the exhibition. It can, says Mr. Wu, feed up to a thousand people at the same time, and most guests end up staying for a quick bite. The revenue from the restaurant now sustains the museum. By the time I reached the rotating Manhan banquet, I was feeling awestruck yet again at the brilliance of Chinese food culture. It's amazing, isn't it? I said to the Chinese man standing next to me as a suckling pig glided past. Yes, he said. You Westerners just eat sandwiches, hamburgers and that kind of thing. We're a little more particular about our food. Normally, when Chinese people make this kind of remark, I am fierce in my defence of European cuisines. But somehow, faced with this dazzling pageant of gastronomy from the last eight centuries, I felt I was on shaky ground. For once I just shut up and that's it.
- [27:38]
Narrator/Presenter
Fuchsia Dunlop, rendered speechless for just a moment, brings this edition to a close. I'll be here again on Saturday morning with more from correspondence far and wide. Do join us. Goodbye.