← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
A Frugal Dinner
00:28:29
Reporters' despatches from around the world. Afghanistan: as pressure grows on the to...
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- [00:00]
Kate Adie
You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent.
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Caroline Wyatt
You can hear the version of the
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Kate Adie
programme we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our site at BBConline. But here's the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
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Narrator/Presenter
Today, a number of notable encounters with an Afghan general who wishes he could say sorry in English with an industrial chemist from Syria in need of a shower in Calais, with a series of surprisingly charming convicted killers in El Salvador and with the guests at a rather frugal dinner party in Berlin. The body of Captain Walter Barry was repatriated to the UK from Helmand Province. This week he was killed by an Afghan soldier. A quarter of all British forces killed this year have died at the hands of men in Afghan police or army uniform, some genuine officers, others Taliban infiltrators. Pressure is now mounting on the Prime Minister to advance the 2014 deadline for bringing home the troops. Nine and a half thousand are stationed there at the moment. Paddy Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader, believes Britain should accept defeat and bring them back as soon as possible. All that we can achieve has been achieved, he wrote in yesterday's Times. Our defence correspondent, Caroline Wyatt, has spent the last two weeks with British forces in Helmand and has been considering the legacy they leave.
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Caroline Wyatt
A lone Afghan policeman stands silhouetted on a rocky outcrop above a fort cut deep into the Afghan stone. Legend has it that this fort in the hills of Nari Siraj was built by Genghis Khan when his army swept across Afghanistan. The entrances that cast jagged black shadows onto the rocks below stand empty. The men who once guarded them long since dust and ashes. It's said that British armies too, used this fort in their earlier Afghan wars. And now it looms silently once again over another army preparing to leave. Beneath it, with a spectacular view over the fertile Helmond river valley, is a new local police checkpoint. Built with mud walls and high towers, it overlooks a landscape that seems to have changed little over the ages. High compound walls surrounded by farmers fields. Only a tarmacked road and the distant sound of a motorbike give clues to the centuries that have passed. The Afghan policemen at the checkpoint are local men recruited to stand watch over their own villages. Some are little more than adolescents, but all handle their weapons with the ease of young men who have been armed since childhood. We meet them on their last day of training by the Royal marines of Delta Company, 40 Commando. They are mentoring the group for the last time before the checkpoint is handed over to the Afghans for good. For now, these local policemen are paid by and loyal to the Afghan government. Their commander, Abdullah, had the confident air of a man who survived a lot of fighting. His eyes crinkle against the sun and he pauses to think when I ask him what it's like here. The situation in this area is good, he says. There are some Taliban bombs, but we find most of them before they go off. The locals can farm, and if the government helps us by building roads and schools and hospitals, we'll be fine. The enemy won't want to fight with us and people will support the government. But if the government doesn't help us and the Taliban do, then people will support the Taliban. That same day, I spend time with the men of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland. They are playing a friendly football match with soldiers from the Afghan army, body armour off and weapons laid down. I ask the young Lieutenant, Sandy Stewart, if he trusts the Afghan soldiers. They are advising, you can never 100% trust anyone. But we are extremely comfortable with these guys, he replies, gesturing to the football match going on noisily behind him. But as we speak, I notice a British soldier standing watch over us, his rifle at the ready, carefully scanning the base. He's what's known as a guardian angel, protecting his comrades from the increasing threat of insider attacks. Trust only goes so far. I think of that when we hear that an Afghan soldier has shot dead Captain Walter Barry from that same regiment after a similar football match in Nat Alley. The mood at the British headquarters is grim. What more can we do to stop this? Asks one British officer in despair. This is a country with a collective case of post traumatic stress, where killing has become the way to settle disputes. The next day, we talk to an Afghan general, Saeed Malouk, who says he's heartbroken by the killing and wishes he could speak English so he could tell Captain Barry's family how deeply sorry he is. His soldiers are strictly vetted, he insists, and they are told that murder is wrong. But the world, he says, is like a jungle, with good and bad everywhere. The General and many others here are preparing for the day that NATO forces leave. Captain Abdul Manan, the young Afghan army commander in Nari's Siraj, shrugs when I ask him what he thinks will happen when the British go. There are two groups of Afghans who are fighting here in, he says wearily, one group is fighting for religion and the other for power. When NATO goes, the people fighting for religion will stop, but those fighting for power will carry on. And as we leave Helmand. I wonder what will survive of the sacrifices made and the blood, sweat and tears expended in this unforgiving landscape, and whether future generations here will look up from their fields sometimes at sunset, at the mud forts and checkpoints built in these final years, and think for a minute or to of the men who fought and died so far from home.
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Narrator/Presenter
Caroline Wyatt Back now from Afghanistan the city of Krasnoyarsk in Siberia has long been known as the prison capital of Russia. The military officers who rebelled against Tsar Nicholas I did time there in the early 19th century. Later it was at the heart of Stalin's gulag system. Foreign prisoners of war were banged up there in the 1940s. Today there are more than 30 jails in the city and there dozens of prison camps in the surrounding countryside. They even have their own name in Russian Kraslags. Alex Preston says a city full of prisons and prisoners brings its own distinctive problems as well as people trying to solve them.
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Alex Preston
The Trans Siberian Railway passes through Krasnoyarsk, swelling its million strong population with soldiers on furlough, workers heading to new jobs, the shifting masses that sweep through a city positioned at the crossroads between European Russia, the Wild east and the Urals. The monolithic spear topped railway station is where prisoners from the surrounding jails get their first taste of freedom let out into the world with a handful of cash and little else to support them. Andre Peretz, a self styled holy thief, was just one such prisoner. He held up a bus at gunpoint in 1994 and got 10 and a half years in a Kraslag. On leaving jail, where he found God and a wide network of criminal contacts, he established a Molina, a safe house for recently freed prisoners in the tree outside Peretz's house, a flock of waxwings, chatter rising up into the air when we bang on the gate. Finally, a small dark haired woman in a pink toweling robe stumbles out of the front door. She was clearly once beautiful, but now her mouth opens into a toothless smile beneath a badly broken nose. This is Valentina Perez's wife. She ushers us into a hot dark room where she and Andrei are watching Braveheart in bed. They have laid out vodka slices of lard reindeer ravioli to welcome me. I perch on a stool, glug back a glass of burning alcohol and wait for Peretz to start speaking. He's a small man with a wave of dark hair and tiny sparkling eyes. Tattoos of skulls and swastikas clamber up his muscular arms to a blue and white striped Russian sailor's vest. He tells me that the Molina, which has helped over 200 former prisoners since he opened it in 2002, is his way of performing his Christian duty in a country where the state has abandoned its people. Putin is the root of all evil, he tells me. How could people be so stupid as to elect a KGB officer? Russia is now a nation of victims, suppressed, just like under Stalin. We have another glass of vodka. The lard is better than I'd expected. Salty and smoky. Peretz smiles. He has more teeth than his wife. There are crowds of hungry people at the railway station, he says all they want is to eat something. At the Molina, he feeds them, lets them sleep in the three warm bedrooms he's built onto the main shack. Take a sauna in the banya. If they're on drugs, particularly the vicious, often fatal krokodile, a codeine and paraffin melange that's 10 times cheaper than heroin and an increasing problem in Russia's cities. He will help them dry out. The prison population in Russia expanded dramatically during the mafia run 90s. Some of the criminals emerge now after sentences of 15 or 20 years, to a world that is unrecognizable. Peretz sees his role as helping them find new ways of earning their keep in a modern Russia where the Mafia have been assimilated into the official channels of police and military power. He has them selling drugs, often heavily cut to travelers at the station, robbing shops in glitzy downtown krasnoiask, stealing cars. I tried to lower the level of criminality in these people, he says. I remember one man who came into the station crazed with hunger, screaming that he'd kill anyone for 15,000 rubles. I took him into my house, fed him, got him back on his feet. He had no documents, so I gave him my own passport to travel home. Night has fallen and I have a date at the theatre. Perez insists on driving me himself. The wipers on his ancient larder don't work and it's snowing heavily now. Every 50 metres, he has to get out and wipe the windscreen with a cloth. It takes us an hour to cross the city. Outside the theater, he leaps from the car and gives me three wet kisses, hugging me closely against his powerful body. He notices I'm not wearing a hat and, waving away my protests, he takes off his own ushanka and forces it onto my head. Three more kisses and I watch him drive away. There's a Russian saying, you should always expect two things in life to lose all your money and to go to jail in a land where the least fortunate are all but abandoned by the state. I can't help feeling that any support system, even one as conflicted and self interested as Perez's Molina, must be better than nothing. I look in the pocket of my jacket and find that unnoticed by me, Peretz has slipped in the rest of the lard, wrapped in a small plastic bag.
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Narrator/Presenter
And that was Alex Preston. Now in one of the most violent nations on earth, it seems that peace may have broken out. Last year, El Salvador had the second highest homicide rate in the world after its neighbour Honduras. But since March, the number of murders has plummeted because of a truce brokered between the country's two most violent street gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha and the 18th Street Gang. These criminal organizations have been at war with each other for more than a decade. Linda Presley has been to jail to visit the leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha, some of the men who signed up to the peace.
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Linda Presley
We're greeted by a man in a hair net. It isn't quite what I expected in a jail that holds over two and a half thousand gang members from the Mara Salvatrucha. Beneath the hair net is the middle aged face of an angel. A baby face, the kind that probably hasn't changed dramatically since he was a little boy. This is Jose Luis Mendoza, 48 years old, serving 52 years for homicide. He's the first of a series of charming convicted killers. We meet in the prison of Syra Barrios as the guard locks the gate behind us and he is the last guard we see until we leave. I say hello to Jose Luis and begin to take in the scene. A long corridor just heaving with men. Jose Luis leads us through the sea of tattooed bodies. Most of the guys are in vests and shorts or bare chested, but there's no jostling, no jeering, just a lot of polite buenos diasing. We're taken down crowded, crumbling concrete steps and reach another gate. It's opened and locked behind us by an inmate who wears the key around his neck. Inside there's a busy covered yard with clothes strung across on lines. I peep over a makeshift partition. Two men are squatting at sewing machines, stitching teddy bears. Another inmate unlocks what's euphemistically called the gym, an empty space the size of a large sitting room with bars where a window might be and a corrugated iron roof. The walls are black and on one of them Mara Salva Truccia is painted in large white gothic letters. Then in Dribs and drabs. Men arrive to greet us. These are some of the most important leaders of the ms, a gang recently designated a transnational criminal organization by the us. They're probably some of the most dangerous offenders in the Western hemisphere, without exception. They're welcoming, friendly. But quickly we get wind that something's up. I'm chatting away to Jose Luis in his hair net in English. When we're told in no uncertain terms to stop. I don't argue. Another gang leader, Jorge, tells me the problem is that they previously decided they wouldn't do any more press interviews, worried about misrepresentation and they didn't get the message we were coming. So now, because the Ms. Is an organisation run according to rigorous rules, all the leaders have to agree before anyone can do an interview about the gang truce. More men arrive and they form an intense huddle on one side of the room. One of them has a scarf pulled up over his nose. You can just see the tops of the letters M and S tattooed across his cheek. The leaders decide Jose Luis should take us on a tour of the prison while they continue their deliberations. I think maybe Jose Luis will remove his hairnet for the filming, but he doesn't. The further we go into the prison, the more dense the crowds. The conditions are appalling. In rooms built to sleep 30, there are 90 makeshift bunks in tiers of three or four that reach the roof. This is a parallel society. There are small food stalls. Someone's frying chips, guys doing washing, learning rap songs, sweeping and swabbing. And then in a courtyard dominated by a mural that depicts numerous gravestones with the names of gang members who've been killed in the bloody war with the 18th street gang. Something is different. All the men are in long sleeved shirts, long trousers and sensible slip on shoes. They clutch small books and form a line that snakes up some steps. The first ones to enter a room take off their shoes and climb up to hammocks slung just under the high ceiling. There they sit, their socked feet dangling onto the men below. These are all born again Christians, and there are so many who want to attend this service. It's the only way to get everyone in. The leaders agree we can do an interview in the gym. Jorge sits flanked by two others as he apologises to El Salvador's people for the innocent victims of the gang war between the Ms. And the 18th street gang. The truce has held for over eight months now. The murder rate has dropped dramatically. El Salvador is holding its breath.
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Narrator/Presenter
Linda Presley. And you can hear the documentary she made in El Salvador in Crossing Continents. That's on Thursday morning here on Radio 4. Ten years ago this month, the French decided they'd shut down the St. Gatt Red Cross asylum centre near Calais. The authorities there had come to the decision it had become a magnet for illegal immigrants hoping to come to Britain. But the problem has not gone away. Local charities who've been trying to offer them some help, believe there are still some 800 migrants in the Noor Pas de Calais region, more than a third of them in the town itself. And Emma Jane Kirby's been finding out they're as keen as ever to cross the Channel to seek out new lives over here.
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Emma Jane Kirby
The seagulls bicker and squabble in the open yard of the soup kitchen, impatient with the migrants who crouched on the concrete mechanically spooning pasta, rarely flick them a crumb from their rations. It's a damp, dull day and the sullen sky seems to have sapped the colour from everything beneath it. The huddled men in their dirty hooded tops and jackets make a solid block of drab misery. Even the seagulls are granite grey and greasy. A young Afghan man's begging the elderly woman handing out small plastic pots of pasta for more. There's not enough, she tells him firmly, shaking her head. He's not the first to ask for more today, and he won't be the last. The pasta in a watery tomato sauce is woefully insufficient to feed the 300 or so migrants who come to this soup kitchen every day, and the charity workers know it. But for the last 10 years, ever since the Songat Centre closed, it's been up to just a handful of volunteer groups to look after all the migrants who come to Calais in the hope of crossing the Channel to England. And they do still come. Near the port, I met Anwar, an unkempt, sallow Syrian man in his 30s, who tells me he fled in terror from his hometown near Damascus after his younger brother was tortured by supporters of President Assad's regime. I learn that he's unmarried, is very close to his little brother and that he's an industrial chemist. He's only been in Calais for six weeks, but he's already tried more than 30 times to climb into under and above lorries in his bid to get to England. Why England? I ask. You speak fluent French. Why not claim asylum here? He looks at me for a few seconds before saying, come with me. Come and see where I live. In the next street, directly opposite some private houses, I see A row of makeshift tents fashioned from patched tarpaulin, rubber sheets, and supermarket carrier bags. Anwar lifts one of the tarpaulins and shows me a filthy mattress littered with damp blankets, odd shoes, and some mouldy. It smells as acrid and rotten as a sick room, and I have to withdraw my head quickly. Seven of us sleep here, but in the night the police come, he says. They spray everything with gas so we can never use it again, and then we have no cover from the rain and no more clothes. In Syria, he continues. We see TV programmes about France. We learn it's the country of freedom, of human rights and solidarity. He looks at me closely and asks, do you think this is a country which respects human rights? I have nothing here, madame. In the queue for the minibus to take the migrants to the shower blocks, I chat to Pierre, an elderly local man with very pale, watery blue eyes who used to volunteer at Sangat and now helps out at the soup kitchen. Despite an obvious illness that makes him shake, his account of the last day of the asylum center has biblical overtones. It was 5 degrees outside and raining so hard that everywhere was flooded, he says quietly. And when these exhausted men came looking for a bit of shelter, they were just turned away and the door locked on them. He lifts his trembling hands. That night the local farmers brought their cattle in for the winter because they said the weather was too harsh. He nods his head towards the group of migrants and gives me a lopsided smile. Are they really worth less than cattle? Our police hound them and hunt them down like plague victims. All the charity workers I talk to agree that Songgat needed to be closed, but all insist that some other infrastructure should have been put in its place. The town hall is reluctant to provide more permanent shelter in case, like Songhat, it should act as a magnet and swell the migrant numbers further. Just outside the town, on the edge of an industrial estate, two small porter cabins make up the migrant shower block. The men push one another in their haste to get in, snatching the phials of medicated shampoo and shower gel offered by the hassled charity workers clamouring for clean clothes and underwear. At the door, a handsome, clean shaven man with gelled back hair is trying to catch my eye. I go over to him with a smile, offer my hand, and introduce myself. Only when he fixes me with a look of reproach do I realize I met him this morning. Madame, he reminds me quietly, I am Anwar, the industrial chemist from Syria. You were a guest in my house,
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Narrator/Presenter
and that's Emma Jane Kirby. European finance ministers meet in Brussels on Tuesday to consider handing Greece more than 40 billion euros in a series of rescue loans. The Greek prime minister has been speaking of his country going bust, but the Eurogroup head, Jean Claude Juncker, is optimistic the final details can be sorted out and the green light given to the handover of funds, which are clearly urgently needed. German agreement to the arrangements is essential, but there's been much talk there about southern European nations being over reliant on German generosity. And Steve Evans in Berlin points out that people there are firm believers in frugality.
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Kate Adie
When I first came to live in Berlin, I was invited to a dinner party, a media dinner party. A German film director and his wife invited me over and I looked forward to it with great anticipation. Usually dinner parties aren't my cup of tea, as it were, but this would be a chance to see how Germans did these things. A correspondent from a fancy current affairs magazine had also been invited, from the Economist, actually, and it was good. Very enjoyable, though not nearly as grand a meal as I'd expected. The table was laid in the couple's flat, we chatted a little, anticipation mounting, and then his wife proudly produced the boiled potatoes, boiled green vegetables and ham. Boiled ham. Now, I like boiled potatoes, boiled ham, boiled vegetables even. But it's not what you would have expected in a similar British dinner that would have been a feast produced to the dictates of Delia or Heston, and probably involving porcini and creme fraiche, the words the English upper crust used for mushrooms and sour cream. The point I'm making is that the German idea of luxury is different from the British idea. Germans really are frugal. They like boiled potatoes and good for them, say I. You might argue that this was Berlin, and Berlin was of course, partly in East Germany. So Berlin frugality has a different background. And it is true that East Berliners were mocked by Wessies when the wall came down because they knew nothing about fancy food. Just after the two halves of the city were reunited, a West German magazine had a cover story with a picture of an East German housewife. You could tell where she came from because of her awful East German perm. She is holding a cucumber and the caption says, look, my first banana. The point is that bananas were such a luxury that East Germans couldn't even recognize one. But the host at my dinner party wasn't an Aussie, but a Wessie, completely au fait, with bananas and even perhaps porcini. No, this was just German frugality. You come across it in lots of ways. I go to a supermarket under a railway arch and it resembles a warehouse. Goods stacked to the red bricked roof with no sense of style or flashy salesmanship. It's price that matters, even for fancy wines. This is not a poor people's supermarket. There is wine there at €60 a bottle, but you can bet your bottom euro that it will be cheaper than anywhere else. Even the rich watch the pennies. Or think of Mediamarkt, the electronics retailer which still refuses to take credit cards or even debit cards. When I presented a card at the checkout, the assistant looked at me like I'd offered to pay with a chicken or the use of my body for half an hour. Nine Danker. So as you follow the debate over the euro and over German resistance to extra spending in Greece or extra spending in Brussels, bear this frugality in mind. It is seared into the German soul. Much is made of the effects of the inflation of 1923, but to my mind, that's overblown, a cliche almost. Far more important are the effects of the Second World War, which are less talked about, partly because German suffering became unmentionable because of guilt. But it was a personal catastrophe for millions of people. Half the homes in Germany were uninhabitable, either destroyed or damaged. So these are people who experienced great privation. And within living memory, American cigarettes became a currency as people scrabbled for food. In this city of Berlin, for example, women, trummer Frau and rubble. Women scavenge the ruins. That kind of experience has to inform your attitude to food and material goods. On top of that, Germans don't actually earn very much compared to those in other European countries, less than in France and Spain, and about two thirds what a comparable British worker has. And the German wage has barely risen over the past decade. They're frugal because they hold back on pay accordingly. Germans hold their wallets tight to themselves. Frugal at the dinner table. Frugal too. In the Finance Ministry.
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Narrator/Presenter
Steve Evans in Berlin there. I don't think Porcini will be on his dinner menu anytime soon.
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Linda Presley
That's it.
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Narrator/Presenter
More from correspondents around the world next Saturday morning. Do join us. Goodbye.