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From Our Own Correspondent
A Good Operator
00:27:54
Correspondents around the world: Jeremy Bowen on the increasing difficulties of the in...
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- [00:00]
A
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.
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Today, the deals correspondents do to report on the deepening crisis in Syria. Even the state is for sale. How corruption has eaten into the very heart of daily life in India. Somalia's far flung diaspora is coming home and bringing a huge variety of accents with it. And what is that the angels love and the locals detest, we're finding out on the streets of Rome. So who will be invited to the upcoming peace conference on Syria? Who'll turn up? The gathering's being brokered by the United States and Russia and is expected to take place next month in Geneva. The idea is to bring together representatives from the regime of Bashar Al Assad and the rebels who for two years have been fighting an increasingly bitter battle against it. Meanwhile, the alliance known as the Friends of Syria has said that President Assad has no role in the future of the country. In a statement issued overnight In Jordan, the 11 nations promised to increase their support for the opposition. The pledge came ahead of a meeting today of Syria's main opposition group, the National Coalition for the World's Media. Finding out what's actually going on inside Syria is becoming increasingly difficult and dangerous. Jeremy Bowen, recently in Damascus, is the BBC's Middle east editor.
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When I started learning how to be a reporter, and as my boss at the time used to say, the learning shouldn't ever stop, it was always interesting to find out what more experienced colleagues thought about each other. One of the highest forms of praise was to be talked about as a good operator. They said about one man who was a well known television reporter 25 or 30 years ago, that he couldn't write his way out of a paper bag. But he was a great operation operator. He won prizes and glory not for his scripts, which were short of nuance or long on cliche, but because they were good enough, taken together with the fact that he was always in the right place to do a supercharged piece to camera and for his crew to get dramatic pictures. In Syria, as in every war, reporters, producers and camera crews need to be good operators. They need to find a way to get to difficult and dangerous places. In Syria, as in every war, that can mean compromises and sometimes deals with people you might otherwise prefer to avoid. The challenge in reporting wars is to survive the day at the same time as coming up with some decent journalism. And of course, there are surreal moments. In Damascus, we stay at an extremely comfortable hotel, which has become the base of choice for the UN as well as for journalists. Before a trip to the rebel held part of the city, I prepared with a visit to the gym and a massage. A couple of hours later, I was in the bombed out remains of a suburb held by the rebels, watching a couple of dentists trying to treat a man whose feet had been blown off by one of the regime's rockets. Everyone in the improvised dressing station was nervous about the chances of another rocket coming their way. I've been concentrating, visas permitting, on Damascus. Getting over the border from Lebanon once the visa has been stamped into your passport at the Syrian Embassy in Beirut, means transporting one of the Assad regime's secret policemen down to the frontier from Damascus to search our gear. I wouldn't say we're old pals yet, but it's always the same man doing the job. When the search is finished and we take the short drive to Damascus, it's good to have the secret policeman along because it means the BBC's minibus gets waved past Assad's men at the roadblocks. Is this a way of conniving with the regime? I don't think so. Journalists in peace and war always have to negotiate to get interviews. In Damascus, we have a minder some of the time who reports back to the Ministry of Information, but he also gets us to places like military hospitals to see Syrian army casualties that we couldn't get to without him. When we need to see the rebels in the suburbs, we use our own connections. Dealing with them also requires compromises, sometimes on both sides. There are sites they don't want us to film, usually things like military positions. Moving around war zones means getting permission from the people who control the territory you're in, whether it's the Assad regime or the Nusra Front, the jihadists who are the most efficient rebel fighting force. It makes no difference that President Assad runs one of the world's most condemned regimes, or. Or that the Nusra Front supports Al Qaeda and is listed as a terror group by the United States. The deals and the permits are stepping stones to get to the story. It's becoming harder, though, because the war is tearing Syria into pieces. More chaos means more difficulty and danger for journalists. And because these days, in a wired world, winning the media battle is so important. Journalists can become targets not because they're in the wrong place at the wrong time, but because of who they are and what they do. We foreigners stick out. The troubles faced by news teams, though, are as nothing compared to the torment the Syrian people experience. A foreign passport can be a liability, but it can also be a protection. We are not having our families killed and our streets and towns burnt or pounded into rubble. Best of all, we have homes and lives in safer places. Syrians do not.
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Jeremy Bowen the new government in Somalia, having established some control in the capital Mogadishu, is now turning its attention to the still problematic south of the country and its strategically important port, Kismayu. Western donors and neighbouring nations are looking on somewhat anxiously. The much heralded rebirth of this nation depends on peace and stability. The Islamist Al Shabaab rebels, chased away from the capital by African Union soldiers, are still in the wings. But if the future remains opaque in many parts of Somalia, in Mogadishu itself, there's now guarded optimism. Andrew Harding says this has been fuelled by the return to the city of many of those who left it during the long years of anarchy and civil war.
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The accents here can be hard to place these days. I'm sitting in a grimy corner of Villa Somalia, the once rather grand government building in the centre of Mogadishu, waiting to talk to a minister. Would you like some tea? It's the minister's aide, Faiza, a cheerful woman in her mid-20s. At first I thought she might be from Birmingham. She laughed at that. No, her accent is Swedish, with a little Dutch and some Liverpudlian thrown in. I've been back for four months now, she says. This city takes some getting used to. It certainly does. After two decades of anarchy and misery, Mogadishu is enjoying something of a renaissance. The spectacular ruins are being patched up, hotels are being built. There are even street lights in some places. And everywhere you hear the accents. Texan, Geordie, Minnesotan. South London, Scandinavian. Somalia's far flung diaspora is coming back in big numbers to visit, to help out, to make money and to find out if this renaissance has any chance of lasting. The jury is still out on that one. Arriving at Mogadishu's beachside international airport, the first thing I noticed was that the wreckage of an old plane crash had finally been cleared from beside the Runway. The second thing I learned was that a massive car bomb had just exploded up the road, killing or injuring dozens of people. We're at a crossroads, says Pfizer a few days later. But I don't know which way it will go. She left her husband back in England to come here to help at the education Ministry. She has a return plane ticket, a spartan hotel room and no salary. The plan is to get a million children back to school this year. But the ministry is starting from scratch, and Pfizer, who left Somalia at the age of two, is wrestling with the culture shock. Those who stayed behind seem to lack the drive and initiative that she picked up abroad. Without the skill, she sighs, we'll still be stuck here in a hundred years time. People have got used to this way of life. Across town, 29 year old Mohamed Yahya is trying to shake off his homesickness with a can of Red Bull. It reminds him of his life back in Wembley. I'm a fish out of water here, he says with a smile. I first met Mohammed last year, soon after he'd flown in from London, determined to do his bit. To rebuild Mogadishu, he's been working for a charity that helps young people struggling to find jobs. Right now, he's organizing a hugely popular televised talent competition, idols, Somali style. People think I'm rude, he says. Aggressive. It's a cultural thing. I'm just too British. In Somalia, you have to be subtler, more apologetic in the way you talk. But at least I get things done. Mohammed works and sleeps in the charity's guarded compound. One of the few times he went out, he got caught up in a gunfight and a bullet hit the wall just above his head. Anything can happen here, he shrugs. The Islamist militants, Al Shabaab, are getting smart. You get the sense the government is lagging way behind and the corruption here is horrendous. But I've made a commitment to stay and I'd like to fulfill it if I can, he says. Plenty of troubled countries have wrestled with the tensions and opportunities presented by a big, energetic diaspora, anxious to help out and sometimes treading on local people's toes. But I can't think of anywhere that has seen such a rapid influx of talent and determination. There's Abukar Dahir, a 25 year old banker who's now helping to rebuild Somalia's central bank, wrestling with the complexities of of a currency swelled by counterfeit notes that everyone accepts and trying to rewire an isolated country into global financial networks. And there's Martello, an estate agent from Essex who has already started clearing ground for a new development on the beach just north of Mogadishu. He's even brought his 13 year old son, Aboukar, who emailed me a copy of the letter he wrote to his old teacher back in the uk. Dear Ms. Rafi, he writes. Please visit Somalia. It's much better now. There's no street Fighting. I play football with my new friends and go to school from Saturday to Wednesday. Come and visit to see the beaches and education system. My dad will provide you with accommodation and security. A week later, Pfizer, the minister's aide, emails me from England. I really needed this holiday, she writes. During her absence, there was a mortar attack on Villa Somalia. No one was injured and Pfizer will be back in Mogadishu soon. But I have no social life, she says. I don't think I could ever settle down there now.
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Andrew Harding in Somalia. The Indian media is awash with corruption stories this week. But then, when isn't it? The latest crop of dirty dealings include a scandal in uttar Pradesh, where 200 people are being investigated in a building scam, apparently involving state officials and contractors. Then there was a fear that Sunday's eagerly awaited of the Indian Premier Cricket League might be cancelled after three players and 11 bookmakers were arrested on suspicion of being involved in illegal betting. A court, though, decided it could go ahead. Cricket, it apparently opined, is a gentleman's game and should remain so. Corruption in India is a major issue. It damages the economy, has eroded trust in public officials and government departments, and, as Paul Lewis has been finding out, reaches deep into everyday life.
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We told our driver we'd meet him back at the same place. In two hours. We were in Delhi, recording for a programme on gold. It was the most auspicious day in the Hindu calendar to buy it. Of course, things took longer than expected and by the time we got back to the minibus, it wasn't 12:30, as we'd indicated, but 1:00pm now, drivers in India treat road signs and even traffic lights as advisory at best. I certainly hadn't seen any markings or signs that controlled parking, and if there were any, they were widely ignored. So we assumed he could just wait there for us. But during that half hour, a passing policeman had insisted that the minibus was parked illegally and the driver had had to pay him. Not a fine exactly, just a way of avoiding something worse. The amount was tiny, 100 rupees, about 1 pound 20. But if our driver hadn't paid well, who knows? So he did. He couldn't risk any threat to how he made his living. At some point, the amount will probably be included in our higher costs, so we may end up complicit in the insidious and universal curse of India corruption. A few days earlier, two government ministers had resigned after separate corruption allegations. The nephew of one was accused of taking a bribe to promote someone for a particular job. The Other was accused of changing a report of an investigation into the allocation of licenses to extract coal. Both denied wrongdoing, but both resigned. People in India complain about bribes with the same fatalism that people in England moan about. The weather unpleasant, but just how things are. Younger people, though, resent corruption, perhaps more than older ones. But even the most determined can succumb. One young woman told me she wanted to get her driving license. Her theory test went well, but when she took her practical, she failed. No reason for the failure was given. That's normal in India. She knew a bribe would solve the problem, but she refused to take part in what she called India's shame. As we spoke, we were standing outside a shop front on a dusty street. The name above the door said affidavits in Hindi and window signs mentioned rent agreements and computerized documentation. I asked her what it sold in India. She explained you need a document for everything. And not just a document, but another document to prove the first document is genuine. So there's a trade in statements swearing that documents are indeed what they say they are. Is it legal? I asked. She laughed. Of course not. The affidavits shop was just two doors away from a police station where officers sat outside chatting and laughing with with passers by. Beside them a misspelled sign read list of persons arrested during last 24 hours. The columns for name, offence and so on were all empty. I looked from one to the other and finally the Indian penny dropped. So I said, if that shop's business is illegal and there's a police station almost next door, someone is allowing it to operate. Of course, she answered. It's a well oiled circle in India. The state is for sale. And what about your driving test? I asked. Did you take it again? She did and failed again. At that point she said her father got impatient with her and said he would sort it out. The license arrived a few days later. So you gave in, I said. You paid a bribe? She shrugged. I needed to drive, she told me later. I listened in as two middle class Indian mothers discussed in English the problems of finding a decent school in Delhi for their children. The best were hard to get into and the rest they just wouldn't consider. Why? I asked, don't you just bribe someone? Surely that's the Indian way. Ah, they told me it's not that easy. Not any more. There's no price list. No one admits it can even be done. And there are so many children from a growing middle class and so few decent schools that even if it was possible, neither of them said they could afford it. The way it worked, they explained, was to support your chosen school financially for a time before your child would start. Even then, there were no guarantees. One said she thought you might have to buy the school a new minibus to have a hope of getting your child in, and you could always be trumped by a better gift. Perhaps, I wondered, a promise of a minibus and the payment of all future parking bribes might do the trick.
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That's Paul Lewis there's not much in Egypt that hasn't been affected by the revolution, which toppled Hosni Mubarak and continues to ripple through life there today. The brutal ways of the Egyptian police was one of the factors which caused people to rise up and demand change. Today. The country's Interior Ministry insists that since the revolution, prisoners are no longer being abused in custody and the country's police force, it says, no longer shoots demonstrators. Nevertheless, allegations continue that officials at Cairo Zeinhom morgue have been doctoring autopsy reports to cover up suspicious deaths. Louisa Loveluck has been investigating.
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The stench is the first thing that hits you as you enter Cairo's Zenhom morgue. The air, already thick with the stifling heat of the day, fills with the smell of blood and chemicals. In Egypt, violent deaths are often politicized, and activists say that autopsies are manipulated to cover up police brutality. Inside the Zenholm morgue, staff stand accused of aiding this process. Weeks earlier, I had been welcomed into the home of Amala Bass, dressed top to toe in black. She was in mourning. She told me that morgue officials hid her son's body after he was shot by police. Mohammed, a regular at anti government protests, went missing in late January after joining an evening demonstration. Family and friends spent weeks searching for his body, returning many times to Zenholm with photographs and a description of his clothes. Requests to enter the facility were repeatedly denied, but on the 10th visit, his uncle was allowed in. He found Mohammed's body with a bullet wound between the eyes. Namal insists that her son was the victim of a cover up by police and morgue officials. Tell me, she asked angrily. Why else would they leave him to lie in secret in the morgue for a whole month? We asked after Mohammed time and time again, but they told us nothing. But inside the morgue, staff protest their innocence. They feel aggrieved at the accusations that dog their work and complain that they are under equipped and overstretched. The budgetary crisis facing President Mohamed Morsi's government means that there is little money to invest in forensics or morgues. At the moment, staff complain that they are having to pay for their own gloves, tools and even drugs. Some of their microscopes are two decades old, and since the wheels broke on the X ray machine, it has been abandoned. In a corner, the morgue itself is filthy, and cigarette butts litter the blood flecked floors. Sitting in the cramped reception, I asked technicians Amr and Ahmed about their equipment. Amr is adamant. We're not asking for a lot. We've seen what expensive equipment can achieve. But all we ask is that our tools are updated. Is that unreasonable? As he speaks, I hear wailing through the broken window. Outside, in the courtyard, a mother has arrived and morgue officials are refusing to let her in. When she grows more hysterical, they close the door in her face. There is little compassion here. Zenholm's resource crisis has heartbreaking implications for those who visit. Record keeping is chaotic, and families will often search through an overwhelming number of corpses with no guarantee of success. Gesturing towards a bank of old fridges, a doctor tells me that a mother can look through almost a hundred bodies before finding her dead child. And all the while there is the stench, the noise. He says, we do not do this right. My mind drifts back to Amal. Her search party had been through this exact process when I asked the doctor why the family had to go through this ordeal, and he picks up the faded blue record book that is used for unidentified bodies. Muhammad's arrival was noted in here, he says, but once a body is stored, it can quickly fade from the memory. This was just one more arrival. We did not expect to see him reclaimed. But surely the wounds on his body must have prompted suspicion? I ask. Of course, he says, but we received so many of these cases. He estimates that Cairo's forensic doctors deal with over 1000 cases of police brutality a year following releases from custody, and says that he regularly receives corpses scarred with belt marks, cable welts and electric buttons. But what can we do? The question appears genuine. Without an order from the public prosecutor, we cannot even conduct an autopsy. Leaving Zenholm, I notice two marble pillars in the courtyard plastered with peeling photocopies. They carry the names and smiling photographs of scores of missing people. Ahmed Mahmoud Hussain, absent since April. Sami Abdel Hakim Fahid and his little daughter, Bus Bous, missing since November. I wonder what reception their families received when they knocked on the morgue's front door. According to historian Khalil Fahmi, Egypt's one time position as a regional trailblazer was based on its history of strong professional institutions in Forensic science, especially Egypt, stood head and shoulders above its neighbors. But now the decline of facilities like Zenholm reflects a growing inability to afford citizens dignity even in death. Rather than revealing a cover up, I wonder whether Mohammed's story instead offers a more heartbreaking window onto the systemic failures that continue despite a revolution.
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Louisa Lovelock in Cairo now, visitors to Rome soon notice how many of its streets and alleyways are paved with cobblestones. They're very much part of the fabric of the historic heart of the city. But while the tourists may admire them, many Romans are far less keen on the millions of cobbles around them. A local newspaper recently put it, like only the tourists and the angels love them unconditionally. The rest of us, the paper went on, those who have the stones under our feet or under our wheels every day detest them or fear them or just admire them from a distance. Our man in Rome, Alan Johnstone, has been reflecting on some of the pros and cons of living in a city carpeted with cobbles.
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I can see all the problems. The alleyway where I live is wall to wall with cobblestones, and I've watched many a young mum struggling to get a pram along it, their little kid's head juddering with every bump. And the stones are smooth. They can be slippery in the rain, treacherous if you're on a scooter. When it snowed last year, each small square cobble was like an ice cube, and they're noisy. Car wheels make a drumming, roaring sound on cobblestones that adds to the clamour of the city. And the bumps batter and rattle the buses as they surf the sea of cobbles on the grand piazzas. So the council is gradually working to remove the stones from the busier stretches of road laying tarmac to ease and speed the traffic. But when it comes to cobblestones, I'm on the side of those angels mentioned in the newspaper. I like them. They've got character. There's just so much more to them than the alternative, the smooth, black blandness of asphalt. In a way, Rome's cobbles have risen from the depths of the earth. They're made of the volcanic rock that welled up in the hills behind the city. And each stone is very slightly different. Each has taken different blows from a chisel as it was knocked into shape. And of course, cobblestones have about them the air and feel of history. They're just the right kind of surface to connect ancient churches with famous fountains and palaces and piazzas. As Roberto Jacobi put it, the Cobbles are part of the pride of Rome. He's a big man in his 50s, with grey hair and dusty boots. He spent all his working life putting down stones in the city streets, just as his father and his grandfather did before him. And as we stood talking at the end of an alley, the air was filled with the sound of mallets clanging off cobbles. Three of Roberto's colleagues were on their knees, relaying a few square metres. He said there was no great secret to doing it right, but that it did take a good eye to get every stone level with its neighbour. You get to know instinctively how many blows of the mallet each one needs. Roberto is proudest of the work he did on Piazza di Spagna, which lies at the foot of the Spanish Steps. Every day, tourists from all around the world climb them and then look down on the square. And Roberto said that it wasn't that nobody else could have laid the cobbles there, but he said he'd done it with passion, with care, for the way it would look. But there was something I wanted to ask Roberto. I'd read that actually Rome's cobbles were no longer worked out of that volcanic rock up in the hills behind the city, that these days, incredibly, the stones were being brought in from China. Could it possibly be true? A man from the Public Works department at the city council said absolutely not. There was no need for new stones. He said old ones were being recycled. Romans weren't walking around on cobbles from China or anywhere else in Asia. But when I checked with Roberto, he pointed at stones along the curb at our feet, a slightly different colour and shape from the rest. He said that they weren't from China, but he insisted that they were from Vietnam. Cobblestones in Rome are known as San Pietrini, which translates as little St. Peter's in this most Catholic of cities, you sometimes hear that there are supposed to be as many cobbles as there are souls that St. Peter saved. But the stones probably got their name because the first place they were put down was on St. Peter's Square, and it remains today a vast expanse of cobbles. It's near where I work, and I was in the piazza one evening recently when it was almost deserted. It was raining and every wet cobblestone seemed to be catching the street lights gleaming. The square was like a field of diamonds, but in one place, its stones give way to a plaque set in the ground. It marks the spot where Pope John Paul II was shot in the attempt to assassinate him in 1981. And there are other places where another very dark episode in the city's past is echoed in its cobblestones. There are brass ones outside some of the doorways in the alleyways in the Jewish Quarter. Each one is engraved with an inscription and each tells a similar terrible story. One I read the other day said, here lived angelo Antikili, arrested 19 April 1944. German troops deported him to Auschwitz and he never returned to walk again on the cobblestones of Rome.
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Alan Johnston there. We'll be back on Saturday morning with more correspondence, tales from around the world. I do hope you'll join us. Goodbye.