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From Our Own Correspondent
A Dramatic Turnaround
00:27:40
Colouring in the spaces between the headlines. In this edition: from elected to Death...
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Thank you for downloading the latest edition of BBC Radios from our own correspondent, the best in news and current affairs storytelling. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Hello. Today, detente is in the air. Havana and Washington are talking. But if you were hoping to visit Cuba before everything changes, you've missed the boat. It's already happened. The cyclone in Vanuatu no longer in the headlines, but the devastation will mark the islands for years to come. We're in the Balkans hearing why scientists are concerned about a man sized fish they call the King of the river. And the story of Gaza's one and only grand piano and how it's being brought slowly and lovingly back to life. But first, there were raised eyebrows this week when Downing street at the last minute postponed the publication of a controversial report into the Muslim Brotherhood, the religious organisation formed in Egypt but outlawed by its new president, Abdel Fattah Al Sisi. It's believed the document was going to recommend that the Brotherhood should not be viewed as a terrorist organisation here, despite it being banned not only in Egypt, but in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates too. A court in Egypt, meanwhile, has handed down death sentences to a number of senior Brotherhood figures for planning attacks against the state. Yolande Nel has been following the group's
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fall in Fortunes Drive west of Cairo, and finally the noisy, overcrowded Giza slums give way to open green fields. Water buffaloes are tethered next to the road and farmers dressed in loose Galabeah robes are cultivating wheat, clover and giant cabbages. I came here to the town of Ausim before Egypt's presidential elections nearly three years ago. Back then, the only banners on display were for the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi and another candidate who was a former group member. Women told me how the Brotherhood had won their backing by handing out free canisters of cooking gas. The rest is history. Mr. Morsi went on to become president, only to be ousted from power by the military a year later. Following huge street protests. Many people from Alseem joined the counter demonstrations and several were killed when these were brutally crushed by Egyptian security forces. Some locals are among the thousands of Islamists who've been arrested now. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt isn't just banned, as it was for much of its eight decades of history. It's classed as a terrorist group that makes life extremely risky for those in Alseem who remain staunch supporters. After Friday prayers, I meet a band of men who've been to four pro Brotherhood rallies since the morning. The security forces have an iron grip now when we go to the streets, they fire tear gas, birdshot, and sometimes live ammunition, says Syed. Although many of its leaders are on trial, charged with inciting violence, Ahmed insists they did nothing wrong. God willing, we'll see the democratic process get back on track, he says. But many in Egypt accept the clampdown on the Brotherhood, believing it failed its test in power. And across the entire region, this relatively moderate Islamist organization has has undergone a dramatic turnaround in its fortunes. For a long time, its offshoots were the main political opposition in many Arab countries. Their social welfare projects helped them maintain strong grassroots. Then the uprisings of 2011 enabled them to emerge as more important players in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria. That emboldened those in the Gulf states, and some started to talk of a grand Islamist project. But such dreams were quickly over. Revolutions unravelled, and ruling families in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia moved to check the Brotherhood's influence. There have been setbacks even in places where its position seemed most secure. In his smart villain, Amman, I sit with Abdelatif Arabyat, sipping a glass of lemon juice with mint. He's a veteran member of Jordan's Muslim Brotherhood and former leader of its political party. He was once speaker of Parliament. Right now, he's deeply worried. After 70 years, his group has just split in two. A new, officially licensed branch defines itself as strictly Jordanian, saying it's cut ties to the regional movement so it's not branded as militant. The legal status of the other, larger faction is less clear, but it's keeping its links to the wider brotherhood. Mr. Arabyat, a lightly bearded, dignified man, suggests that foreign factors have stirred up trouble here and that Jordanian security officials enhanced the conflict. Not far away in the Palestinian territories, Hamas, which is aligned to the Muslim Brotherhood, is also suffering from the organization's demise. Its leaders were treated like VIPs in Egypt during the Brotherhood's brief reign. But this month, Cairo joined Israel, the United States, the European Union, and others in pronouncing Hamas, a terrorist organization in Gaza, which is controlled by the political faction. Ordinary people feel more isolated than ever after Egypt's military coup, the siege on Gaza has been tightened, says a policeman, Abu Zahar Khatawi. I also spoke to a student from the Islamic university, Mustafa. We're saddened by the suffering of our brothers in Egypt, he says. The real terrorists are those who shoot dead. Peaceful demonstrators across Gaza, the green flags of Hamas still flutter defiantly above the mangled metal and rubble of homes destroyed in its last war with Israel. But throughout much of the Middle East. There's a sense that times are changing, and what worries many is that just as the Muslim Brotherhood, the grandfather of Islamist groups in the region, is in decline, so fanatical ones like Islamic State are gaining momentum. The danger is that efforts to suppress the Brotherhood could radicalize its younger supporters and help swell the ranks of the extremists.
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And that was Yolande Knell. Big cyclone, not many dead it's meant that most of the correspondents who flew into the tiny Pacific nation of Vanuatu last week have now flown out again onto other stories. But hundreds of people are still homeless. The winds destroyed towns and villages, crops and livelihoods have been ruined, water and power supplies cut. The UK is one of several countries which have now sent in aid. But problems remain, and John Donison says they'll be there for years to come.
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A fortnight ago, if you were to have flown over Vanuatu, the tiny chain of islands would have shimmered below you like a necklace of emeralds, their lush tropical green set against the deep azure of the mighty Pacific. But as we skimmed low over Tanner Island a few days after Cyclone Pam and had ripped across the archipelago, I peered down to see little more than an ugly brown scrubland, hundreds of thousands of trees stripped bare of their leaves. It was almost as if they'd been flipped over and I was looking at the roots rather than the branches, the odd palm tree left standing, appearing bent, blustered and bedraggled like an overused toothbrush. This was once a jungle. Now look at it, our pilot Matt, said as our three decade old six seater Cessna reared up over a smouldering volcano below. Every now and then debris strewn villages would emerge on the horizon, but as we approached, it was clear. Nothing much was left standing, just clusters of flimsy houses obliterated as if they'd been stamped on by some giant foot. A few villagers waved their arms to the sky towards us, desperate for help. How low can you fly? I slightly nervously asked Matt, a former crop duster from New Zealand. Oh, about five metres above the ground, he said casually as he plunged downwards. Once on the airstrip, a team of New Zealand paramedics was treating an injured teenage girl. Her mother watched on anxiously, tensing every time her daughter flinched, feeling her child's pain. A few minutes down a bumpy road, we came to the village of Imaioli, or what was left of it. Most of the houses were simply flattened, some made of corrugated iron, some of thatch, some of breeze block, but unable to withstand the storm. Although in the middle of the tiny hamlet, at least one building had held firm. This is my toilet, said Jimmy Nakapue, the village chief, pointing over towards the compact concrete block. We all hid there when the cyclone came. Nine of us, he said, glancing over to his children and grandchildren playing amid the rubble. Thankfully, they all survived, but they're among thousands who are now homeless, sleeping under a tarpaulin in a makeshift shelter. By profession, Jimmy is a head teacher. That's the school, he said, pointing to a pile of bricks, rubble and twisted metal on the ground. The children's exercise books could still be seen fluttering in the breeze. 50 kids were taught at the school, and it took Jimmy a year to build it. The school opened just three weeks ago, and now it's gone. There must be hundreds of communities across Vanuatu like Jimmy's, many still waiting for help. The death toll remains mercifully low, remarkable given the force of the cyclone, which brought winds close to 200 miles an hour. Unlike with other recent tropical storms, such as Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines a year and a half ago, when well over 6,000 people were killed, there doesn't seem to have been a major storm surge Then. It was the tsunami like wall of water which killed so many in Vanuatu. That didn't really happen, and while wind is destructive, it's not as deadly as water. Vanuatu is the kind of place that only makes the news when it's bad news. And yet it's a fascinating country. People in Vanuatu speak more than 100 different languages, not bad for a population of just over a quarter of a million. Vanuatu has the dubious privilege of being colonised jointly by both the French and the British, the European rival squabbling over its administration for decades until independence in 1980. But the low death toll means interest in Vanuatu will likely quickly diminish. The story will drift from the headlines perhaps sooner than it should, and yet the impact on this country will be far more long lasting. People here are going to need help for a long time. Tens of thousands have lost their livelihoods in this fertile, steamy part of the world. Vanuatu will soon regain its lush green, but after the worst cyclone here in decades, it could take years for the country to fully recover.
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John Done American and Cuban negotiators had another round of talks this week, but they surprised observers by emerging with little to say about what progress had been made in formalising their new relationship. The optimistic had hoped there'd be an official announcement that diplomatic relations between the USA and Cuba were finally to be restored after a hiatus of more than half a century. Perhaps Even an end to the restrictions on Americans visiting the island. After all, Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro are due to meet up in a highly choreographed Summit of the Americas early next month. But Polly Hope, a frequent visitor to Cuba, says at street level at least, life's already moving on.
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Oh, you've been in Havana. Lucky you. I'd love to go and see Cuba before it changes, you know, before all the Americans get there. I've never liked comments like that, partly because they reflect a rather patronising view of the country as some sort of geopolitical theme park, a 1950s time capsule, an ideological lost world. Partly because they seem to ignore what Cubans themselves might prefer, but also because they're just so wrong. For a start, Cuba has been changing for a long time now. It's never really stopped. But most especially since its leadership decided more than 20 years ago to rescue its wrecked economy by turning back to the old, once reviled sugar daddy of international tourism. Cuba never was entirely cut off from the rest of the world. It's always had its visitors, whether they were fortune seeking Spanish immigrants or or Soviet era technicians from the Eastern bloc or Western, if not yet American tourists. Cubans too have always travelled the world, no matter what obstacles were in their way. The international traffic is just getting a bit busier. I've been visiting the island for nearly 15 years now. Over that time it's changed in fits and starts, sometimes seeming to go backwards. Cuba's government insists that its mission is perfecting socialism, not abolishing it. Never mind giving in to free market capitalism. But the general direction towards a more Chinese or Vietnamese model, where one party still rules but people own and operate small businesses now seems irreversible and noticeable. You see it in tiny material things. The growing numbers of Chinese university students hawking trinkets or bouncy castles and plasticky toys for kids, or the splashes of fresh paintwork on Havana's crumbling streets. The crowds of now slightly better off Cubans, many with jobs in tourism or family abroad, flocking to spend money in smarter, once tourist oriented cafes and restaurants. Perhaps most visible of all, there are the cell phones people now use unselfconsciously in shared taxis or bus queues, and the ravenous, undisguised appetite for more connectivity. When I asked friends if there was anything worthwhile on tv, they snorted in derision. No one watches Cuban TV anymore anyway. Some would use an illegally tapped line into an illegal satellite dish, showing a steady stream of tear streaked telenovelas and hardline anti Castro propaganda from Miami or watch a pirated dvd. But the new thing is a sort of offline weekly digest of U.S. tV and pages downloaded from the Web called El Paquete. You get everything from classified ads to clandestine news to beauty and gossip magazines copied on a computer hard drive, erased and recopied every week. I never did discover who decides what goes into El Paquete, but I did learn that it costs about £1.40 a week for a terabyte more content than you could possibly watch. So the Cuban time capsule is well and truly cracked open. No one I talked to was giddy with excitement. This was a sceptical optimism, or perhaps optimistic skepticism. Many habaneros are manoeuvring like mad to build themselves a more prosperous future. I heard gossip circulating about the imminent arrival of cruise ships, about whether foreigners are once again buying up all the best bits of Havana, about whether Cubans will ever be able to get an Internet connection at home. They were pleased about improving relations with the US and hoped that families split between Cuba and America would find it easier to come and go. Some said they were eager to meet some more actual Yankee tourists soon. There were plenty in town already, whatever the American rules trying to stop them. There wasn't a hotel room free anywhere in the city. One of the guests at my B and B was a Cuban American woman whose father had left in the mid-1960s, vowing never to set foot there again until there were no more Castros. His daughter, born in the usa, had now fallen madly in love with Cuba and planned to visit again as soon as she could. When a good Cuban band plays live, there's often as much banter as there is singing. Any true hit has a catchphrase, often an improvised couplet, which a crowd will shout back out. Dancing one night to the renowned Los Van Vajn, I heard, Como hay americano en lavana estanco moles talagana. Meaning, roughly, just look at all the Americans in Havana doing whatever they feel like. So if you're one of those people wanting to see Cuba before it changes or before the Americans get there, then I'm sorry to break it to you, but you're already too late.
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That's Polly Hope. 70% of its population in the Balkans could perish. That was the alarming forecast made at a press conference in Ljubljana the other day. It wasn't a human population they were talking about. It was a fishy one, the Danube salmon, known as the king of the river. This is a creature which can grow to the size of a man and can live for 30 years or more. The threat to its future, according to a group of scientists from seven countries across Europe, comes from a plan to build more dams and hydroelectric power plants in the region. Nick Thorpe was in the Slovene capital to hear what can be done to save the salmon.
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It's very fast, lean and elegant and very beautiful, says Ulrich Eichelman. He might have been describing a racing car. In fact, the director of the environmental group River Watch is talking about a fish Hugo. Hugo in Latin, huchen in German, often known as the Danube salmon in English because it was once found in much of the Danube basin. But its main remaining refuge today is in the Balkans, in the streams and rivers which tumble down the mountains and twist through the valleys between Slovenia and Montenegro. We Europeans cry out with indignation about the plight of the last tigers in the wild in Asia and demand efforts to save them, says Ulrich, as we trudge through the wetland forest down to the shore of the River Sava in Slovenia. But we seem blind to the threat to these last tigers of our own. The Danube salmon. Ahead of him, a man with a white bucket treads gingerly among the snowdrops which carpet the floor of this forest, just waking from its winter hibernation. In the bucket are five of these slim blue, green, grey, white, silvery creatures, three years old, each about 40cm long, twisting and turning in the narrow space like teenagers on the dance floor, sensing their imminent release into the wild. This fish is a good indicator of the health of our rivers, explains Stephen Weiss, an American scientist based in Graz in Austria and one of the authors of the study. It needs a lot of space, fast flowing, clean water and a very specific habitat to spawn, to maintain a self sustaining population. The ecologists, in alliance with the Slovenian Anglers association, have brought Danube salmon with them today to humor us journalists as they launch their campaign to save the fish. We reach the stony shore, a banner is unfolded. Save the Sava. The name of the river seems designed to fit the English verb, and in a matter of minutes the deed is done. The racing fish are away, zigzagging through the shallow waters, over the flat stones of the riverbed, towards the rapids nearby. I first came across this fish in Joseph Fisher's garden beside the Danube in the Wachau region of Austria several years ago. Joseph is a wine grower and angler who breeds thousands of them each year in tanks among his vines. There's a tank for those several months old, big eyed creatures filling the space like a sky full of arrows in slow motion. Separate tanks for 1 year olds, 2 year olds, 3 year olds. I watched him partially drain his pond, where his prize specimen, a handsome female, lay peacefully. He carried her gently to a blue container, made her drowsy with a sedative in the water, then ran his big farmer's hands skilfully down the whole length of her body, several times trying to massage the eggs out of her. Had he succeeded, he would then have brought a large male fish from another pond to fertilize them. On that occasion he failed. No eggs. He took it manfully. I missed out one stage in the process this year, he explained. Next year I'll go back to the tried and tested method. In the meantime, I have enough fish here already. 10,000, in fact. He estimates. Each year he releases several thousand into the Danube, repopulating the river with a noble species which once migrated up and down it in large numbers. But the many hydroelectric dams, built mostly in the 1950s and 60s, destroyed their spawning grounds and turned the river into a succession of lakes. Later, when he'd taken off his galoshes, we sipped his crisp white wine and watched the afternoon sun light up the ruins of the castle where good King Richard of England was once imprisoned on a hill on the far bank. I haven't eaten this fish for 10 years, Joseph Fisher confessed. I like them too much. Back on the River Sava, Stephen Weiss explains how salmon breed in the wild. The queen finds a section of riverbed she likes the look of the king sidles alongside. They perform a dance together, sweeping away the fine grains of gravel to make a nest. She lays her eggs, and as she does so, he sows his own seed over them. And like a sudden underwater cloud, when it's all over, she sweeps a fine film of sand over the eggs with her tail. A month or two later, small fish emerge, princes and princesses of the Balkans.
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Nick Thorpe in Ljubljana the Palestinian territory of Gaza is no stranger to this program. No stranger to conflict either. In recent years, devastating conflicts with Israel have left much of the Strip in ruins, while blockades of its borders have meant shortages of many basic good goods, as well as anger, resentment and a sense of isolation. So when Tim Whewell heard that a grand piano had been located there, the only grand piano in the territory, and it was being restored to its former glory, he knew that this was a Gaza story with a difference, and he set off to investigate.
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Yogin Aladawi's delicate fingers dance enthrallingly across the ivories, and in my imagination I'm transported from the dense urban squalor of Gaza to the wide, wild foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. She's playing Chopin unselfconsciously, intensely, as she must once have played him in her youth in the Russian city of Vladikavkaz, far, far away from this besieged concrete warren on the Mediterranean. And for a few glorious, dizzying bars of etude opus 10, number one in C major, she too is transported. She forgets. I'm standing behind her in a pokey practice room in a music school based, bizarrely, in an ambulance station, and her lips, her lipstick to lips, purse in concentration. Then she remembers me, and she tells a story about something that happened 15 years ago, soon after she first came to Gaza to be with her husband, a Palestinian doctor she met when he was studying in Russia. She was a professional piano teacher and accompanist, trained at the Rostov State Rachmaninov Conservatory. Music was her world. She moved to a land that barely knew Rachmaninov or Chopin. She had no instrument to play. But after three months, she happened to be at an event hosted by the Red Crescent, where there just happened to be a piano. Knowing who she was, the chairman of the Palestinian Red Crescent, Fatih Arafat, the younger brother of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, invited her to play, and afterwards he described what he saw. Ilyana settled herself at the piano and completely forgot there was a huge crowd around her. She was, Arafat said, like a parched traveler in the desert who eventually finds a well and drinks and drinks until their thirst is quenched. Remembering that moment, Jelena throws back her uncovered head and laughs in a manner that is not of the women of Gaza. Her first years here were tough. In all its long history, Gaza has never been known as a beacon of the arts. In biblical times, it was a philistine stronghold. Yuliana arrived long before the militant Islamists of Hamas took over in 2007. But already Gaza was becoming steadily more conservative, with some rejecting music as haram, forbidden by God. Yaghina cad sheet music off Scandinavians who passed through for international agencies. But she was the only piano teacher in Gaza, and music wasn't isn't on the curriculum of any ordinary Gaza school, neither the UN nor the government ones. Her thirst to work as she used to was only finally satisfied seven years ago with the opening of Gaza's first music school, which about 200 children now attend. In the evenings, it's hidden from hostile eyes inside the Red Crescent headquarters, which explains the ambulances outside. When I meet Juliena there, she's rehearsing the terrifyingly wide hand stretches of the Chopin for an unprecedented event, for the first time since she left Russia, she's about to play on a concert grand, a grand piano in Gaza. I thought I was somewhere else, she says of the moment she first saw it. It's the only such instrument in the Strip, a diplomatic gift, some say from Japan, though no one quite remembers. But till recently, even the musicians of Gaza didn't know it was there. They discovered it two years ago in a disused theatre, its strings rusting away. But before they could get it restored, the latest round of the conflict with Israel intervened and the building was wrecked by a rocket. But almost miraculously, the instrument survived. And now a young piano restorer has been brought from France by a charity called Music Fund to bring it slowly, lovingly back to life. The piano is not for Juliena, of course, though those Russian fingers can't wait to caress its keys. It's for Palestinians. Palestinians like Juliana's star pupil, Sara, a startlingly self possessed 15 year old who describes in her matter of fact teenage way, the three wars she's lived through. It's like you're in an action movie, she says. Funny to say that we don't have shelters underground in Gaza, so we just have to run for our lives. Music, she says, kinda helps. It might not bring back your loved ones, but it makes you feel better. It helps you survive. Has it helped all those classical composers with complicated personalities that Juliana has taught her about? Chopin was such a romantic guy, she says, and Beethoven was deaf. If you look into their personal lives, she adds, you'll see they fought a lot and went through a lot too. Yes, I think, as Giuliano launches into another vertiginous flight of arpeggios. But perhaps not quite as much as the people of Gaza. And they didn't have to wait so many years to practice on a grand piano.
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And with that from Tim Whewell in Gaza City, we've reached the end of another edition. Back just to the One program next week on Saturday, and I hope you'll join us then for another collection of correspondence stories from around the world. Goodbye.