← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
A Shattered Mosaic
00:28:14
Kate Adie presents correspondents' stories from Syria, the US, Australia, South Africa...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC.
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This is from our own correspondent. You can hear the version of the programme we make for the BBC World
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Service by visiting our site at BBConline.
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But here's the latest edition broadcast on
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BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today we have the pointy heads of American academia who've been looking for answers to the problems of Syria, Iraq and Egypt. But is anyone listening? We meet a special Australian breed, the Cubs, who've been driving the economy, but who are now having to put their toys away. And we have heroic tales of grandfathers and fathers from South Africa and Italy. What to do about Syria? The leaders of the G20 countries fail to agree. In St Petersburg, there is no clear consensus among politicians here, while the US Congress vote on whether or not to support military action may not happen for another fortnight. In the meantime, Syrians are leaving their country, heading to refugee camps, particularly in Lebanon and Jordan. The UN refugee agency says more than 2 million people have now fled Syria. The Zaatari refugee camp has become Jordan's fourth largest city. Liz Doucet, who's been into the camps and into Syria itself, wonders what all this upheaval means for Syrian identity.
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He wore sunglasses and a flowing tunic to protect himself from the blazing sun. But Nayev's own defenses were gone. I'm too embarrassed to speak with you, he confessed. I used to run my own car company in Deraa. Here I am in this refugee camp on the side of the road, peddling packets of cigarettes. But naive wanted his story to be heard. It's a very Syrian story, a sad story. Most are these days. I lost my wife, my children in this war, he said. I lost my dignity. I lost my country. But this large man of proud bearing is still undeniably Syrian. If the Americans strike, I will go straight back to my country. An expression of hope, however much in vain, that any outside intervention could bring an end to a punishing war. In the gaggle of children who surround us, 15 year old Mohammed pipes up, when they strike, I will run all the way home. His friends giggled and beamed at such audacity. Home is where the heart is, where memories are born and never die. For Syrians, it can be a whiff of sweet jasmine, steaming mounds of pine nuts and rice at a family table, the gentle breeze that wafts through a neighborhood at night. Even in the sprawling Zaatari refugee camp in the barren desert in Jordan, something of that Syria grows. Gone are the neat grids drawn by UN planners, families uproot tents from allocated sites and drag them to other spaces, rearranging them in traditional Syrian style around a makeshift courtyard. Entire neighbourhoods with local leaders reform in familiar patterns. Zaatari is now a copy, a poor copy of the Syrian town of Deraa, a few miles away, where most of them fled from. Some refugees even call it Syria. Syrians are drawing new lines in the sand. Nearly a century after borders were drawn across this land in the Middle east at the end of the First World War, imperial powers carved out their territories in the Ottoman ruled Levant and a modern Syrian state was born first as a French mandate. But Syria's identity has been forged across centuries. Many Christian sects, going back to the earliest years of Christianity call it home, as does a Jewish community, several Islamic sects, many ethnic groups. This is what is known as Syria's mosaic, a human tableau as intricate as the ancient patterns made of glass and stone that this country is famous for. Its more modern mosaics are exquisite creations of wood laced with pieces of mother of pearls that are iridescent and resilient. Now this much vaunted mosaic is being shattered. A war which has cost so many lives, wiped away entire towns, is also tearing a people apart. Mosaics need something to hold them together. For decades it was exhortations to pan Arabism, slogans to the ruling Ba'ath party and the Assad family, and a vast police state. Now narrow sectarian differences are being stoked by a regime dominated by the minority Alawite Islamic sect to frighten other minorities into remaining loyal by Sunni jihadi parties, linked to Al Qaeda by powerful rivals like Saudi Arabia and Iran, for whom this war is about more than just Syria. Don't ask who is responsible, a leading Christian patriarch from Syria insisted to me this week. We are all responsible and we must all find a way out. On a recent visit to Damascus, I had dinner with friends at a long table in a quiet garden. I had just been to Ksair, a city in ruin after months of brutal battle. But for every account of destruction and desecration we shared that night, there were other more hopeful stories of Christian and Muslim communities working together across dangerous front lines. Of memories of a monastery close to Kousser, which once produced olive oil and wine along the mighty Orentis River. At the end of the evening, a Syrian friend produced a present. A bottle of that wine. A simple bottle, a symbol of a not too distant past. In Arabic, the Orentus is known as Al Asi, the rebel. It flows northwards. Syria now moves in a direction few could have foretold so much has been lost, but many still hold on to Syria, to a sense of belonging still as strong as their lustrous mosaics, still strong enough, they hope, to survive even this darkest of times.
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Lise Doucet it's not just what to do about Syria that eluded agreement. The problems of Iraq, Egypt, and a host of other Arab Spring countries have also proven intractable. Both Western powers and homegrown revolutionaries have had to learn a painful lesson. Breaking up a country is all too easy. Putting it back together is far more difficult. So is there any new thinking out there about how to fix things? That's what Humphrey Hawksley went in search of at some of America's top universities.
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From the ornate Grand Central Terminal in New York, the commuter train winds through black, grimy underground tunnels until bursting into the light of a late summer's day on its way to New Haven, Connecticut. Then, as the city falls behind, we settle for our two hour journey north and running parallel to the Long Island Sound. A guard passes, and as I speak to him, a young man, recognizing my accent, says, you must be from England. Are you heading for Yale? Yes, I answer. What takes you there? I'm trying to find some answers to Syria and Egypt, I say. The guard rolls his eyes. Good luck getting any sense out of La La Land, he says. He clips my ticket and hands it back. The young man smiles. That's what they call us academics. We all come from La La Land. New Haven itself is an edgy place, one of the most violent cities in America. Yet at its heart lies the Ivy League Yale University, whose roots go back to the mid 18th century, when it was founded to promote what it calls liberal European education. Bill and Hillary Clinton met here while studying law, and former President George W. Bush, who ordered the 2003 Iraq invasion, was born and graduated from here. With car bombs exploding almost daily in Iraq, now Egypt in turmoil, and chemical weapons unleashed in Syria, I went to Yale to see what, if any, new thinking is taking place on how to deal with popular uprisings and the toppling of dictators. My first meeting was with a professor, Emma Skye, a young British adventurer and a veteran of war and international development. Her plain speaking landed her a job as special advisor to the US Military command in Iraq. How do you fill the vacuum, I begin, that's created whenever a dictatorship suddenly collapses? Emma grimaces. First, she says, bringing her hand down on the desk to make the point, you need to maintain the state. If the state collapses, people turn on each other, they form gangs, and there's unlimited violence because there's no state structure to suppress it. Ok, I respond slowly. But that's what happened in Iraq. And now the Syrian opposition wants to pull down Assad state structures. So are there any new ideas? I don't see many. Emma draws in her cheeks. Her lips tighten. She drums her fingers. There's still been very little discussion here on what went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's almost a tacit agreement not to open up a Pandora's box. There's not that willingness to go back and reflect. The next day I take the train to Princeton, another of America's Ivy League universities, which which, like Yale, dates back more than 250 years. But unlike gritty New Haven, the town of Princeton is an encapsulation of the American dream, with lawn gardens, white picket fences, and tidy shopping streets. A large colonial style house is home to a think tank called Innovations for Successful Societies, where researchers fresh in from Afghanistan, Mexico, and other places wrestle on how to get it right. So, say Assad in Syria is suddenly gone. I ask what should be done to stop the killing. The first thing to do is deliver big results fast, says Dr. Jennifer Widner, who runs the program. Find some public services that matter a lot to ordinary citizens and improve them. In a very short period, that'll begin to change the way people think about government. But in Iraq, I recall, people didn't have water and electricity for years. Jennifer nods. And look at Egypt, she says. Then after that, what? I ask. She lists more basic bullet points that seem also to make perfect sense until I interrupt. Has anybody from government actually called you about this? You or any research program like yours? She casts a glance around her colleagues, who look blank. There was some activity around 2008, she remembers, but it was fragmented. Iraq, though, was 10 years ago, I say. Why is it taking so long? She shrugs, unable to hide her own frustration. I'm not entirely sure. On the train back to New York, my accent once again gets me drawn into conversation, first with a Princeton professor, then with a giant of a man, muscles and tattoos bulging through the sleeves of his shirt, who overhears us. You just coming in from La La Land? He asks, using that phrase again. He's a builder, but also a military veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. I put to him Emma Skye's theory about the failure to reflect. She's right, he says. We suffer from historical amnesia, which is why right now the government doesn't have a clue.
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Humphrey Hawksley, back from the ivory towers of America's Ivy League while much of the rest of the world was in the doldrums of recession recently, the Australian economy was powering ahead, mainly thanks to its mining industry. But as Australians have been choosing their new government, today, the outlook is looking more bleak. Falling resource prices have seen thousands of workers laid off. James Fletcher rode into town to see the impact for himself in the heart of Australia's coal mining region on Queensland's east coast.
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When Scott Grallow bought Mackay Motorcycles in 2007, the shop had just had its best year. They'd sold 150 Harley Davidsons. Not bad for a town of just over 100,000 people. Then two years later, he sold 210 of them. It went from boom to boom. Boom, he tells me. Those numbers made him one of the biggest regional Harley dealers in Australia. It was full on, says Scott, more bank manager than bikey. With his neat thinning hair, clean shaven face and rectangular glasses. He starts to talk about Fat Boy, Street Bob and Fatty Low. Australians have a certain fondness for politically incorrect nicknames, so it takes me a minute to realise he's not talking about his mechanics. They've got the look that everyone likes, he says, walking along a row of the low slung, chrome piped machines slouching on their kickstands. That tough muscle look. And the sound, too. Scott turns the key in a fat boy and the engine roars to life. A fierce explosion tamed by masterful engineering, channelled into an air warping rumble. Fat and low. It's a siren song if sirens smoked two packs of cigarettes and drank a bottle of whisky a day, tempting mostly men to fulfil their youthful promises to themselves and spend unwisely. They were basically miners, scott says of the customers who drove his record sales. The price wasn't an issue. They just wanted them. It used to be said that Australia rode on the sheep's back. But for the past two decades, Australians have been astride the Harley Davidson of world economies. While other developed countries struggled along the B roads of austerity and recession or limped into the mechanic for an IMF mandated engine rebuild, Australians have opened the throttle on the highway of economic growth and prosperity. The wind in their hair. Powered by the toughest and muscliest of industries, mining, China needed coal and steel to power its growth and build its cities. And Australia has them in abundance. The global financial crisis barely registered here. As resource prices rose, investment flooded in and fortunes were made. And not just at what Australians call the top end of town. Cooks and construction workers, truck drivers and mechanics. There were stories of high school dropouts making more than 100,000 pounds a year. Most probably did sensible things like pay off their mortgages. But high earning, big spending, blue collar workers became the defining characters of this modern day gold rush and how they spent their cash became its law. They even had a name, Cubs, which stands for Cashed Up Bogans. Bogan, like the British Chav or the American white trash can be a term of abuse or a badge of honour, depending on who uses it. And the Cubs were revered and reviled in equal measure for their conspicuous spending and perceived lack of taste. In Mackay, my guide to the good times is Garry Choi, a wiry, energetic character with a shaved head and sunglasses. As I switch on my recorder, he promises to switch off his constant use of the F word. I won't lie, I had a lot of fun, he tells me. As an entrepreneur and bar owner, he saw how the money was spent. Harleys, trucks, toys, girls, boob jobs. But like all parties, eventually the music stops and the lights come on. Resource prices have fallen substantially and mining companies have slashed their costs. In Queensland, more than 8,000 coal mining jobs have gone in the past 18 months. The problem with all this is you gear up for it, gary Choi tells me, and then when things aren't so good, you come down with a big thud. At Mackay Motorcycles, Harley sales are down around 15% from their peak. It was a surprise that it happened that quick. Scott Grallow says Boom Boom has gone from Mackay. But as I leave his showroom, Scott points out one growth area, the local second hand classified magazine. There's lots of bikes in there, he tells me. Probably twice as many pages as before. I buy a copy and call the first ad I see for a Harley. Jason answers. I'd rather put more money on the mortgage than have some nice little toys to ride round on, he says. At his work there are plans for 600 redundancies and. And he's worried. Before the chop comes, I just want to be ready, he tells me. There will be many more like him round Australia, people whose jobs and businesses are going or gone. When you're riding a Harley, you're king of the road. But when you fall off, you get hurt, just like everyone else.
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James Fletcher dusting down his battered leathers in Australia. Our next two stories are family tales from our correspondence. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela has spent his first week back home after after almost three months in hospital. But the man who led the struggle against apartheid remains very ill. Well wishers have been leaving messengers painted on pebbles outside Mr. Mandela's home in Johannesburg, Mark Lohan has Just returned from there where he was researching a personal story of another anti apartheid fighter.
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He was presumably unaware of the activity at the gates, the coming and going, the the hum of satellite dishes as television reports were filed inside the Pretoria hospital for almost three months he lay an ailing Nelson Mandela who few expected to emerge. But he has to be cared for at home. Still critical, but by all accounts peaceful. Before his release, I visited the hospital to read the messages of love for the 95 year old former president. A man who fought the scourge of apartheid, who led South Africa to democracy and whose lack of rancor after 27 years in prison has practically made him a living saint. Outside was a young man from the northern province of Limpopo. I'm studying, I'm free because of him, said Jacob, his smile as warm as that midday sun. As I left, I shook his hand. He held my palm and laughed. This is the first time that I've had a white hand in mine.
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He.
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He said it's rare to hear such things in modern South Africa, especially in a big city. He, aged 21, never knew apartheid. The four dark decades of racial segregation ended before he was born. And yet the legacy will take a generation or more to shake off the history of those who fought it has been written the leader of the struggle in and out of that hospital, but also the white, often Jewish campaigners like Helen Suzman and Joe Slovo. I met their families and friends on my trip to hear their stories and to find out about a lesser known anti apartheid figure whom I never met, my grandfather, George Loewen, who died in 1969. Before I was born. A senior lawyer from Berlin, George had a history of opposing authority. He was to be defence counsel for the Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe, charged with burning down the German parliament in 1933. The Nazis used that to ban the Communist Party and entrench their grip on power. When the Gestapo heard that my grandfather, a German Jew, was defending, they went to his home. George was warned by his neighbors and so he fled to Paris and then to Amsterdam. In 1935, he boarded a ship without knowing its destination. It was bound for South Africa. The young barrister, who spoke no English, worked as a petrol pump assistant in Johannesburg to fund language school and legal training. In 1938, the law was changed so my grandfather could become the first German refugee to swear allegiance to King George VI and practice in South Africa. As advocate and then Queen's Counsel, George fought apartheid laws often instructed by the solicitors Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo. Later leader of the African National Congress, George worked pro bono for blacks and coloreds evicted. His speciality was the Group Areas act that dictated where races could live. He acted for the family of Luxmart and Gudle, an ANC activist tortured to death in detention, the first person to die in custody under apartheid. And he defended Jimmy Cantor, acquitted in the Rivonia trial, which convicted Mandela and others, sentencing them to life in prison. George Bezos, Mandela's lawyer, wrote later that the suave, flamboyant Loin brooked no nonsense and often informed magistrates of this quite directly. I went to see George Bezos to better understand my grandfather. He was elegant, he said. I was sometimes his junior. In fact, I thought of myself as a poor man's George Loen. He told me about the day when 200 black residents of Alexandra Township walked into Johannesburg to protest against the past laws limiting their movement. They were arrested and my grandfather represented them. Have my clients had lunch? He asked the magistrate. No, came the answer. It is outrageous to try these people without feeding them, George insisted. The magistrate, unwilling to provide food for 200 defendants, promptly dismissed the case. That I found was the grandfather I never knew, a man unafraid of confrontation who went from Jewish refugee to a champion of black rights. I visited His Majesty's Building, a Johannesburg office block that housed his first chambers. When I asked the guard to see room 813 once occupied by George, he radioed his boss, a Mr. Lowen. Would like access to the eighth floor. He said, a white man. I was duly taken up, but to a bare office with no sign of its great history. Before I left South Africa, I enjoyed a spectacular evening concert of the young black soprano Pretty Yende. She grew up in a village near Swaziland and now sings at La Scala in Milan. Her voice is as dazzling as her story. And in the audience sat a mix of all races and ages charmed by a home grown fairy tale that is the vibrant, democratic South Africa emerging from its unhappy past. And it is one of which my grandfather would have been proud.
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Mark Loen, equally proud of his grandfather. What did you do in the war, daddy? It's a question that no doubt has been asked a number of times. And the answer may not always have been clear cut. It's also the title of a Hollywood film set in Italy just as Italian troops were surrendering to the Allies in 1943. This weekend marks the 70th anniversary of Italy's armistice. Mussolini had been overthrown a few months earlier. Tom Carver's father was a British POW in Italy. the time, and Tom's been examining and celebrating what the Italians did in the war.
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Although it's only two hours from Rome, the Abruzzo is a remote, wild region in the heart of Italy. Seventy years ago, my father, Richard Carver, sought out its jagged, inhospitable landscape to hide in from the German army. Like thousands of others, he'd been captured in North Africa and shipped to a POW camp in northern Italy. When the Italian government declared its Armistice on September 8, 1943, the kindly Commandant of his camp cut the wire and 600 men rushed out. Most of them headed for the coast or to Switzerland. But my father took the unusual decision of walking south to try to reach the Allied forces. He had a very personal reason for doing so. His stepfather was General Montgomery, who was then fighting his way north at the head of the British 8th army in the Abruzzo. He and Jim Gill, a fellow prisoner, hid in a cave by day and went up to a farmhouse each night to be fed and to sleep in the barn. The family who looked after them, the de Gregorios, did so at enormous risk to themselves. The Germans were executing anyone caught harbouring British prisoners of war, and the woods around the farmhouse were full of German troops. A couple of years ago, I wrote a book about my father's experiences. This summer it was published in Italian, so I went back to the Abruzzo. People packed the village halls to hear the story of my father's escape. In the main town of Palletta, they organized a lavish reception. As the Italian and British national anthems echoed around the square, the mayor, sporting a colorful sash over his large stomach, stood smartly to attention. My 7 year old daughter and a local Italian girl were invited to pull back the union flag and the Italian tricolor and to reveal a huge plaque cemented into the square marking the spot where Monty had set up his HQ. For three months in the winter of 1943, another plaque had been installed in the olive grove outside town, at the place where my father was finally reunited with Monty. All this attention was rather surprising. In historical terms, this was small beer. Monty parked his HQ in plenty of town squares in Italy. But what I realized was that my father's story carried considerable redemptive power. The Italians, like the French, have a complicated relationship with the war. Mussolini and his fascists enjoyed a lot of support. The German occupation was certainly less popular. But even then, most communities in the Abruzzo contained at least as many collaborators as resistors. One house near the German command post in the town, for instance, was occupied by a mother and daughter. The mother actively helped the de Gregorios. Every time she saw German troops heading towards their farmhouse, she'd lower a sheet out of her bedroom window, which the de Gregorios could see, giving them time to get my father and Jim back in the cave. But one day, German patrols started combing the woods with dogs calling out to my father and Jim to surrender. Someone had tipped them off about their existence. It turned out to be the mother's daughter who was sleeping with the German commandant. Stories like that are part of the secret histories of communities all over Italy, even three generations on. People in these villages still know exactly who helped the Germans, who resisted and who did nothing. The next day we went to see the cave. Someone had cut a nature trail through the thick undergrowth in the hope of it becoming something of a local tourist attraction. Look, said the mayor excitedly, you can still see the straw that your father lay on the There was certainly straw there, but it looked suspiciously fresh. And what's more, it wasn't the same cave they showed me five years ago. I didn't mention it, and it doesn't really matter. The woods around there are littered with limestone caves. What mattered was the pride they took in the story about how the villagers had protected Richard and Jim. Everyone turned out to watch us visit the cave, the mayor, the priest, the carabinieri, and no doubt the descendants of collaborators and partisans alike. Amid so much ambiguity and guilt about their past, here was a story of unquestionable Italian bravery and selflessness. It made them feel good, and they wanted to be a part of it.
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Tom Carver rejoicing with the heroes and villains in Italy. And that's it from this edition. I'll be back with more from our correspondence next Saturday.