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From Our Own Correspondent
A Poisonous Cocktail
00:28:23
Burma: Jonathan Head goes to Rakhine state in Burma where bitter unrest has resulted a...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent. You can hear the version of the 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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Today, stories of love and loss, anger and grief in a cemetery overlooking the Bay of Tripoli. A poisonous cocktail of resentment casts a shadow over Burma's new democracy. We go fishing close to the islands at the centre of a furious argument between Japan and China, and see the real business of America being done in a tired looking ballroom in Indiana. More than three quarters of the population of this country are expected to observe the two minute silence at 11 o' clock tomorrow morning. It's a tradition which began after the signing of the armistice at 11am on Nov. 11, 1918, which brought the First World War to a close. The event will also be marked at Remembrance Day church services and at many of the war dead cemeteries run by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in countries around the world. Kevin Connolly's been to visit one of them in the Libyan capital, Tripoli.
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They came to the shores of the Mediterranean with rifle and pack rather than bucket and spade, and now they lie in silent rows not far from where the turquoise water nudges lazily against the beaches of Tripoli Bay. This is a time of remembrance. But to walk through the headstones of Portland stone in this war cemetery is to remember how much we have forgotten too. One of the inscriptions says simply, into the mosaic of victory I lay this precious piece. Some mother or father or wife, far from the battlefield where their soldier died, sensed that the loss which filled their thoughts and broke their hearts was an unfathomably small part of the largest of all human dramas. In Tripoli, you are reminded of just how complex that mosaic was and how the last act of Britain's creaking empire began with this gathering of the pieces from across its far flung territories. Commonwealth war graves are designed to evoke the spirit of English gardens, even in places like this, where the burning North African heat means the trees are palms rather than oaks. So you are somehow not surprised to find highlanders and lifeguards here and the names of ancient county regiments, Sussex and Cornwall, Dorset and Durham. But into the fighting in North Africa, Britain threw forces from places where the tranquility and symmetry of a cottage garden would have seemed an impossible luxury. South Africans who served in the Tripolitania civil police force lie alongside the dead of King George V's own Bengal sappers and miners. The graves of the cavalry of The Sudan Defence Forces are marked with their striking badge showing a mounted camel trotting into battle. The exhausting campaign in North Africa was simple but brutal. The forces of Britain's empire pushed the Axis armies westward along the great coastal highway that runs the length of the southern shore of the Mediterranean. The mission was to drive them away from Egypt and the Suez Canal, that vital artery that connected Britain to India. The Middle east was the hinge of the Empire. It was a draining and dangerous war, veterans remembered. Flies seething and swarming on every inch of skin, living and dead, crawling into your nose when you breathed and into your mouth when you tried to eat. You expect to find here the graves of drivers and sappers, troopers and stokers, havildars and sepoys. There are highly decorated senior officers and sergeants in their late 20s and early 30s, the men who bind together infantry regiments in battle. But this was a huge and complex modern army, raised to fight the fastest moving and widest ranging war in history. And the headstones tell the stories of other men who braved the fighting alongside them. John Fernandez was a butler in the Merchant Navy, but his buttling days were done. After the fighting, Henry Walpole, a supply assistant, filled in his last form and lifted his last crate somewhere here too. And who knows what reserves of nerve and loyalty sustained Fateh Mohammed of the Indian General Service Corps. His headstone says simply that he was a water carrier. My eye was drawn, too, to the graves of another group of non combatants, men from the British Merchant Navy who died when their ship, the Ocean Voyager, was torpedoed in Tripoli Harbour, where it exploded and eventually sank. They were donkey men and greasers, the men who manned the crane that loaded and unloaded the ship. Often under enemy attack, the Voyager was loaded with high octane fuel and ammunition when it was hit. The survivors worked with extraordinary bravery to save the ship and to rescue their injured shipmates from the flames. Among the men they could not save, the grave of Cornelius O' Shea perhaps stands out. He was 65 years old, unimaginably ancient to the young soldiers amongst whom he lies. Here and there you find personal inscriptions whose brief words can hardly bear the weight of the sadness they carry. You feel, you know Flight Sergeant RHJ Harris a little because his mum and dad chose to record that he kept a straight bat and played the game. And there's something of the anger towards the enemy and the grim determination that we don't talk about much anymore in the inscription for Lance Bombardier GWS MacDonald, which says, I gave my life at 21 to beat the Hun. There is a similar story of love and loss and anger and grief for every headstone, of course, but it's the sheer scale of the suffering which stays with you. And don't forget, a similar story could be told from any war grave anywhere on earth. In all the history of conflict, though, there has been nothing, thank God, to compare to the Second World War. No mosaic so complex or so costly was ever built, nor one that contained so many pieces. Truly something worth remembering.
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And that was Kevin Connolly. The Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San SUU Kyi has called on the Burmese government to send more troops to the country's western Rakhine State. Tension there between Muslims and Buddhists has left more than a hundred dead and 100,000 displaced. Rakhine is the second poorest state in Burma itself, one of the least developed countries in the world. Jonathan Head says poverty, neglect and repression have all played a part in fuelling this communal violence, as have bitter historical memories.
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In early 1949, a former British administrative officer who'd served in what was then known as Arakan wrote a confidential memo to a colleague in the Foreign Office. He offered his insights into the unrest which had swept through that region of western Burma after independence the year before. He described two peoples, the Arakanese Buddhists, whom he likened to the Scots. They were descendants of a powerful Buddhist kingdom in the 16th and 17th centuries, he wrote, and had provided some of Burma's ablest politicians and civil servants. Then he described the Muslim Chittagonians, as he called them, people of Bengali origin. They are fanatically religious, he wrote, and more hard working than the Buddhists. They'd been moving steadily south into Burma for centuries. He went on to explain that when the British had retreated from the Japanese army in 1942, there had been terrible massacres in which thousands had died. The Muslims had, by and large, backed the British, the Buddhists, the Japanese. After that memo was written, Burma endured more than a decade of civil war and shaky democracy before the military took over in 1962 and turned inward. The Burmese people were shut away from the outside world, trapped in their poverty and with their historical memories. Burmese history was in some ways frozen. The Shwezedi Monastery is a shabby but dignified old building in Sittway, the provincial capital of Arakan, which is now known as Rakhine State. The monastery has a great pedigree, though. It was the home of Burma's first political monk, who inspired Aung San, the father of opposition leader Aung San SUU Kyi to begin his campaign for independence from the British. The monastery also played a courageous role in the mass protests against military rule five years ago. Today, though, it's supporting something altogether less heroic the drive by local Buddhists against Muslim Rohingyas. The Chittagonians of the Old British report the abbot, Ashin Arayavunsa, ran through a long list of grievances for me against the Rohingyas. They take too many wives and have too many children, he said. They don't educate their women and they violate ours. They want to turn Rakhine into an Islamic state. These views are very widely shared in Burma, and they're given legitimacy by the government's refusal to recognize Rohingyas as Burmese citizens. Buddhists feel entirely justified in calling for Rohingyas to be expelled. In a country brutalized and impoverished by the long years of military rule, this has escalated all too quickly into something like ethnic cleansing. I travelled around northern Rakhine in the only way you can by boat. The coast here is indented by a jagged maze of creeks so shallow we often had to wade a long way to reach the isolated fishing villages. At Centimor, normally a community of around 1500, we found 5000 displaced Muslims, some still in shock from watching their own neighbourhoods being burnt down. There were men with bullet and machete wounds and a very young widow with two small children who'd seen her husband shot dead in front of her. There was barely enough food to go around, even with deliveries starting to come in from the un. Malnutrition is visible in the children. Further upstream, we saw the scorched palm trees that indicated what had been the Muslim quarter of Pauter. Only the walls of the mosque were still standing. The wood and palm thatch houses had been reduced to piles of crumpled iron and ashes. You could hardly guess that hundreds of families had lived there up until last month. The one surviving Muslim quarter in Sittwe, Aung Minghala, is sealed off from the rest of the town by barricades guarded by soldiers. Its residents are living just 500 metres from the town centre, but they can't go there, either to work, to shop or for medical help. They are living in a ghetto. Both communities are now afflicted by a paralyzing fear of the other side. They won't go near each other, so there's not much chance of easing the mistrust. Government officials say they don't even discuss citizenship for the Rohingyas for fear of a violent backlash by Buddhists. Rakhine is the second poorest state in an already very poor country, its Buddhist population shares a folk memory of a glorious past before they were incorporated into the Burmese Kingdom and then the British Empire. They have more recent tales to tell too. However true these may be of Muslim atrocities, of creeping Islamization, it's a poisonous cocktail of resentment, pride and prejudice. And it's cast a dark shadow over Burma's new democracy.
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That's Jonathan Head. Japan and China have been exchanging angry words this week. At a summit meeting of regional leaders in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, the rouse over their competing claims to an uninhabited group of islands in the South China Sea, which are administered by Japan but claimed by China. Rupert Wingfield Hayes hired a fishing boat and crew to go take a closer look at the disputed territory. It was, he tells us now, an educational experience.
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When you arrive in a new country as a foreign correspondent, the first thing you try to do is figure out how the country works. Japan, where I arrived three months ago, has a reputation for being particularly tricky for foreigners to understand. And so it's proving. Take, for example, the little trip I recently took out into the East China Sea. The objective was the Senkaku Islands, as they are known here in Japan. If you live in China, they are the Diaoyutai. I'm just going to call them the islands. The Japanese government has banned everyone, including Japanese citizens, from landing on them. You are, however, allowed to go fishing in the waters nearby. But before we could set off, we had to undergo an inspection by the Japanese Coast Guard. And this is where things started to get interesting. The coast Guard officers were extremely polite and friendly. They were also surprisingly thorough. They wanted to see our fishing equipment, rods, reels and bait. They even wanted to see whether there really was ice in the boat's fish lockers. Then came a question I was not expecting. What is the purpose of your trip? The senior officer asked me. Um, I hesitated, wondering whether I was really expected to lie. We're going fishing, I said. The officers looked pleased. They nodded sagely. Fishing?
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Yes.
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Good, good.
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All of this was being filmed by my colleague, Jiro San, with a large television camera. We'd made no attempt to hide our equipment or who we were, but the charade appeared to be important. And it didn't end once we were at sea. After eight hours of sailing, we approached the islands under cover of darkness. On the radio, the Japanese coast guard were calling our captain. We're preparing to come aboard, they announced. Through the darkness, a pair of speedboats were sweeping towards us. Our captain and his two crew now immediately sprang into action. Pulling out fishing rods and reels and setting them up on the back of the boat. We need to look like we're fishing. They giggled. Then, as dawn broke over the islands and we began our filming, our shipmates really did begin fishing. They pulled aboard at least a dozen beautiful big red snapper, which slapped around on the deck at my feet. They'll want to see these when we get back, our captain smirked. For the next few hours, everyone lost interest in fishing. The Chinese had arrived in the shape of four maritime surveillance ships. The Japanese Coast Guard was now much more interested in keeping the Chinese ships away from us than us away from the islands. It was all quite exciting as a slow motion game of chase around the islands ensued. But when we finally did get back to the small Japanese island of Ishigaki After 24 hours at sea, there were our friendly coast guard officers waiting for us. How was the fishing? They asked. Really? I thought. Are you serious? Apparently they were. So what does this tell us about Japan? Well, I think it shows the tension in Japan between the need to apply rules and the deep desire to avoid conflict. Rules are very important here. Japan is a highly structured and hierarchical society. There is a rule and regulation for everything, but there is also a huge fear of conflict. And so Japanese people have learned to negotiate the web of rules to interpret them, while still making sure they have covered their behinds. Something very similar happened when I went to get my Japanese driving license. British people are in theory allowed to swap their British license, but there is an obscure regulation that was nearly my undoing. I had to be able to prove that I'd lived in the UK for one year after obtaining my most recent licence. How am I supposed to do that? I fulminated. I haven't lived in the UK for 20 years. The gentleman at the licence office looked pained. And then suddenly his face brightened. He had an idea. When did you take your driving test? He asked. 1984, I said. When did you go to university? 1985, I said. So you have a degree certificate from a UK university? He asked. Brilliant. He had his piece of paper, I had my Japanese driving license and conflict had been avoided. It was the same with our friendly Coast Guard. If challenged by a superior, he had done his job. Our captain had made sure we had fish to show him and we had our precious filming. Of course, no one was really ever in any doubt about what we were really up to.
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Rupert Wingfield Hayes, the final piece of the US election jigsaw slotted into place yesterday with the so far unofficial announcement that The Democrats had won the vote in Florida. In the end, Barack Obama didn't need this, the biggest swing state, as his results elsewhere in the country ensured that he won a decisive Electoral College victory. This weekend then provides an opportunity for some hard earned rest for the campaign teams who've spent weeks trying to ensure the votes went their way. For Johnny diamond, one of the BBC correspondents following them, it's also a time for reflection.
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The candidate stood in the car park of the hotel in the midwestern state of Indiana. He was pale and drawn, obviously exhausted by the campaign. The opinion polls were too close to call the race. His face spoke of weeks away from home, of endless speeches, of food at other people's tables beside him, fielding calls and emails. A tall blonde assistant hunched over her phone. The candidate's opponent had said something outrageous at the debate the night before, and local, state and national media were queuing up for a response. One by one, the candidate dealt with them now and then, favouring a friendly reporter with a private aside. The answers came easily by rote, a line agreed before with his campaign team and then repeated with little variation to every camera crew and proffered microphone. Presidential campaign stops are often in aircraft hangars. They allow the candidate to fly in, sometimes taxi close to the opened hangar doors and then step out into a crowd already warmed up by local stars, a senator or state representative, the nearest mayor. Huge banners hang from the walls proclaiming the slogan of the day or week. Change, hope and forward are favoured words. A vast American flag is never out of sight. The candidate will be placed so that the camera crews, long pre positioned, take a view of him, chosen by the campaign team, the next President of the United States. How many times have the candidates heard that is introduced and the stump speech is given. A speech the travelling press corps have heard so many times that they exchanged knowing glances at particularly poignant phrases and at the beginning of a life affirming anecdote involving recovery from some terrible misfortune. And then the candidate is gone. The engines fired up, the plane lifted off. When you speak at airports and have your own jet, you can get to so many more places in a day. The candidate outside the hotel wrapped up his interviews, consulted the tall blonde about timings and went to the lavatory. His audience had already been waiting for some time, but they were in no hurry. Every week they met here in a tired looking ballroom in an ugly hotel off Interstate 69 in Indiana. If this week was special, the assembled businessmen and women didn't show it. They helped themselves to the nine Dollar lunch, glutinous potato salad, slightly more sprightly coleslaw, a tray of slices of bright orange cheese and processed meats, a bowl of fruit salad. And then they settled down to create a hum of amicable conversation. The candidate, not the president or his challenger, but a local congressman pitching to become senator, took his seat at the front with no fanfare. In one corner of the room, a US flag was coiled around a pole. Behind the main table, a purple banner hung with Rotary Club spelt out in bright gold letters. All rose. The Pledge of Allegiance was recited, the national anthem sung, a prayer made with heads bowed. With ceremony over, announcements were read out, accompanied by much laughter at the gentle ribbing of friends and colleagues. Every guest of the club was introduced, stood up, took in the welcome of the crowd. Students in attendance were asked to speak, to describe those whom they felt to be their mentors. My brother, said one, because he is a really good Christian. There was warm applause. The Rotary minute came. Hands went into wallets and purses, dollar bills piled up in small silver buckets in the middle of each table. There was a message from a local man, now a soldier in Afghanistan, to whom the club had sent a care package filled with magazines and food and memories from this quiet corner of northeastern Indiana. He emailed his appreciation of the gifts. Thank you, he said, for letting me serve the greatest nation on earth. I will be home soon. There was more applause. The crowd was white and comfortably middle aged, the students dotted on their tables more mixed. Hispanics, Asians, African Americans, the next generation of Rotary Club members. The nearby town had nothing much to speak of. Some fine municipal buildings, some nondescript office blocks, and all around it, the ugly, sprawling anonymity that makes up so much of retail America. Car dealerships and fast food restaurants, petrol stations and manicurists all surrounded by a sea of concrete, most of them national brands, luridly advertised in plastic and with fluorescent lights, their huge signs jostling for drivers attention. But inside the lunch, none of that drab environment mattered. Inside ballroom C of Don Hall's guest house, the real business of America was done. Charitable and hospitable, generous and decent, and amongst the good people of the Rotary Club. The candidate got up to speak.
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Johnny diamond, now back in Washington. Now. We were talking earlier in the programme about Remembrance Day and how so many people here will be paying their respects to the war dead in church. It's a sombre occasion of hymns and prayers. There'll be a two minute silence in some places. The last post will be sounded as Congregations consider the sacrifices made now. Of course, they do things rather differently in some other parts of the world. Will Grant is in Mexico, where they believe the departed should be remembered in a festive rather than a funereal atmosphere.
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The Mexican relationship with death is unlike that in other parts of the world. There is still mourning, of course, bitter tears and sadness among those left behind. But once a year, this country embraces, even celebrates, the passing of its loved ones and wishes them well on their journey into the hereafter. Nowhere is this communion with the other side more keenly felt than in that most mystical state of Oaxaca. We had traversed the dramatic mountains from the Pacific coast, encountering military checkpoints and a thousand hairpin bends along the way to arrive in the state capital, Oaxaca City, on Halloween. In Mexico, Halloween isn't so much about children in fancy dress playing trick or treat. Rather, it marks the start of a national two day long celebration which combines the Christian feasts of All Saints Day and All Souls Day with traditional indigenous rituals of Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead. And it's quite a sight. In every small business and home in Oaxaca City, people had erected small altars to their departed, replete with photos of the deceased and small offerings. Their favourite drink, a cigarette, perhaps if he or she smoked, some food and sustenance to help them on their way. But it is on the following night that proceedings really pick up. On a cold evening on the 1st of November, the families of Oaxaca and across Mexico go to the cemetery. There they light candles for their late relatives and friends and the partying begins. It's a feast, so food and drink are passed around over the gravestones and it's a party. So people dance quite literally on the tombs of their dead grandparents and parents. To unaccustomed eyes, it can appear strange and macabre, but as hostel owner Guillermo tried to explain to me, it's all part of saying goodbye. A lot of people from Europe and the US come to Oaxaca and ask me, why do you do all this? Why go to such lengths? It's of no benefit to you. You don't get anything out of it. A friendly man with a gentle way of speaking, Guillermo says that for him, Day of the Dead is about the unknown. None of us really knows where we're going to end up once we go into the ground. What happens after that is down to your own beliefs. We're just trying to send away the spirits and the souls of those people we loved with a final embrace. He recommends we travel to the small village of San Augustin Etla to see the ceremonies there. A tucked away place 15 minutes drive from Oaxaca City. The locals take the Day of the Dead pretty seriously. Upon the main hill a troupe of dancers and musicians have gathered. At first people are just milling around waiting for the event to begin. Then suddenly the band strike up a kind of nightmarish Oompa and the night begins. From nowhere, dancers appear wearing costumes of mirrors and stars. The mirrors are intended to ward away evil spirits. Given that this is the night when the spirits are again among us. There are some incredible characters. A series of extremely macabre clowns. A skeleton wearing a bright blue 18th century court dress. The wolf from Little Red Riding Hood with a hand lolling where its tongue should be. A group of living dead mariachi musicians. There is political humour in there too. The as well as some not so subtle digs at the church. A pig in a cassock for example. And masks of identifiable Mexican politicians. Someone is also mimicking the left wing student movement called Yozoy Siento trentedos. Despite the skulls and fake blood everywhere you look, the young children of San Agustin Etla are present, wide eyed but fearless, gripping tightly their parents hands. Some are dancing as they watch, learning subliminally that death is to be accepted and celebrated as part of life rather than hidden away and feared. Then the fireworks explode. Never a fiesta in Mexico without fireworks. The whole parade starts to wind its way through the village until we arrive at the church. The bells start to toll for the dead and the brass band strikes up a funeral march. Dum dum da dum dum dum da dum di da. One of the figures acts out his death, another the grieving widow. The singing builds and the whole village joins in a single chant. Dios te salva dolorosa. God comfort your pain. My own grandmother died earlier this year and I felt a certain catharsis amid the crazy celebrations of death and the small drink of mezcal I raised to her health. Indeed, the whole event was taking place on what would have been my grandfather's 92nd birthday. It's all about time, a young musician dressed as Zorro says to me at one point, displaying gravitas beyond his years. Everything in its moment and every moment when it comes, will grant there with
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the lively mourners of Oaxaca, bringing this edition to a close. I'll be back with more from our own correspondence next Saturday morning. I hope you'll join us. Goodbye.