← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
A Shopping List for Cuba
00:28:04
Despatches from correspondents: Why should the west intervene with aid or arms? It's a...
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- [00:00]
A
This is a download from the BBC. It's from our own correspondent. We make one version of the program for the BBC World Service, but this is the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ad.
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Hello. Today, the calamity facing families who've come down from the mountain in northern Iraq. A Sunday morning lie in interrupted by the jihadists of Al Shabaab. Stressful moments on a nuclear submarine as an argument breaks out in the Panama Canal and partridges in brine. Anyone? A frantic shopping expedition for our correspondent on her way to Cuba. Kurdish sources say that dozens of men from Iraq's Yazidi minority have been killed by Islamist fighters in northern Iraq. Some reports speak of villagers being ordered to convert to Islam or face summary execution and the and of women being taken prisoner. Earlier, tens of thousands of Yazidis took refuge on a mountain as they tried to escape the advance of the Sunni fighters of the Islamic State, formerly isis. Many have now arrived in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. The UN says they're exhausted and thirsty. Caroline Wyatt tells us there's now serious concern about the health of those who've come down from the mountain.
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In Mosul, smokers are getting desperate. Not content with crucifying or beheading their enemies on the way there, the fighters of the Islamic State who've taken over the city have now banned cigarettes from the shops. At least I think they have. Like so much that we hear these days in Iraq, from the number of refugees still left on the mountain to the fighting that's still very much going on. Some things remain opaque while others grow in the telling. But what's clear is that the Islamic militant's reputation for savagery is enough to drive hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and before them, Syrians, from their homes. Mergin tells me about Mosul, the place he grew up in. As we drive through the city of Dahuk, the Kurdish businessman and his family, like many others, are looking after relatives who fled Mosul. But friends who remained say the extremists are blowing up churches and the mosques they don't approve of, all in the name of religion. We all lived together there and nobody cared who was what in the. She says sadly that's no longer the case for much of Iraq today. Yet in the centre of Dahuk, with its cafes and busy shops, a humanitarian crisis has been quietly unfolding. It took a mountain filled with fleeing families to put it centre stage. But now the plight of the Yazidi refugees is all too visible. First in their flight to the mountain, and now the makeshift sanctuaries here in derelict buildings, the men, women and children crammed together without sanitation, water or food. Their exodus from the mountaintop and arrival on foot. The old and the young in the heat and the dust, mothers clutching their children look like an image from the Old Testament. In Dahuk, though they are far from the only ones fleeing the terror. This once obscure religious minority has joined many other refugees, from Christians to Shabak, Kirk Kai, Armenian and Turkmen minorities, as well as Shia Muslims. The Yazidi are just the newest of the 1 million displaced and scattered across this region by the fighting in Syria and Iraq. And it's left the province of Dahuk struggling despite the shopping malls and the glossy new buildings that are the fruits of oil. The governor, Farhadatrushi, only took office a little while ago, but he has the air of a man with many things on his mind, despite his relative youth. We meet at his hillside home on a balmy evening overlooking the waters of the lake. He greets us in fluent English. We're not his only visitors. A German delegation has just left. Then Iraqi MPs all want to know how this humanitarian crisis can be resolved, and a crisis it most certainly is. He knows they're working against the clock. It takes six weeks to build a refugee camp, he says, and many more are needed. But epidemics don't wait that long, and the money simply isn't here. Baghdad hasn't agreed a budget for this area since the spring, but thousands of children have arrived, many sick, almost all unvaccinated, from one of the country's poorest provinces. I ask why the west should intervene with aid or arms, and his answer is persuasive. Because we face a calamity. We don't have long, and if we wait, more people will die. The third of Iraq is living in terror. We have to save the Yazidi and protect what we have here, people who live together in peace. In the part of Iraq that's been a beacon of hope, and it's true, in places that aid agencies haven't yet reached, and there are many local people have brought home cooked food, water, clothing, and much more to help families they don't even know, moved by common humanity, and a remarkable tolerance of the dispossessed is visited upon them. But the west and the south trying to carve their way across Iraq, the Islamist militants are in part still advancing, although Kurdish Peshmerga forces are now digging in and fighting back. The Islamic State has young men willing to die to impose their joyless vision of life. But all here insist the Kurds are also ready to defend the harvest they've sown over many difficult decades. If the west doesn't intervene, and quickly, one bright spot in Iraq could be extinguished, warns Fahadir Troushi. And he says if the Islamist militants aren't stopped, they'll gain fresh territory from which to sow terror. He has hope for the new Iraqi government that it may, if not reconcile mistrustful ethnic and religious groups across the old Iraq. At least let them work together. As we leave, a heavy crescent moon hangs over the governor's house. I can't quite tell if it's waxing or on the wane as it illuminates this warm Iraqi night.
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And that's Caroline Wyatt. Representatives of Israel and Hamas have been talking in Cairo as the ceasefire in Gaza continues to hold. The negotiations are aimed at finding a long term solution to the conflict over Gaza. But both delegations admit the talks are making little progress. Hamas wants Israel to end the blockade imposed on Gaza in 2006, while Israel wants Hamas fully disarmed. Kevin Connolly is in Gaza, where there's little optimism that a lasting settlement can be reached.
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A day will come when the area around the seaside hotel we use in Gaza will be flooded with tourists and they'll marvel at the distant horrors of the past. It's happened on the Mediterranean before. Look at Sicily and Tunisia after the Second World War, and one day it will happen here. It just won't be any day soon. Tourists will find Gaza waiting. The half finished building next door already has signs offering pizza and ice cream, even though there's no pizza and no ice cream and no one to buy them anyway. Nature has certainly done its bit. Nowhere is evening more beautiful. The sun smears the surface of the sea with copper coloured light, as though it had skidded across the waves and come to a halt on the horizon. And at about that time of day, that half built building teems with life. Refugees from other parts of Gaza are living there, one family to a room. They probably calculated Israel wouldn't bomb a building beside a hotel full of foreigners. The adults are quietly impressive. Women scurry between the entrances to different staircases on the hot flat roof, carrying huge kettles of boiling water. At the sound of naval gunfire, they barely raise an eyebrow or spill a drop. The children fizz with energy and curiosity, singing out their names across the gap between the buildings and demanding to know hours. They quickly learn to wait until you're on the air, using the balcony's portable satellite dish before shouting across, knowing that our desperate requests for quiet then have to be mimed, much to their amusement, I find myself worrying what the future holds for them. Gaza, their place, it's is cursed by history and geography as surely as it's blessed by nature. If you are six years old in Gaza, you have already lived through three separate wars, the ugly and brutal confrontations with Israel, which fled in 2008, 2012 and again in this year. It is as though Gaza is a kind of junction box, with a dysfunctional neural wiring of the Middle east, fused long ago. British imperial forces seized Gaza from the Turks in 1917 during during the closing stages of the First World War, one of those victories that made the Holy Land Britain's prize and Britain's problem. So Gaza was first born from the air 97 years ago, a grim and dangerous overture, as it turns out, to a century which is ending as it began. Israeli tanks first appeared here in 1956, part of the disaster of the Suez crisis. Although Israel returned the land to Egypt the following year, in the war of 1967, Israel came back and it's occupied Gaza or controlled life inside it ever since. And just as Gaza appears to have bent in every historical wind that's blown across the deserts here, so it now seems that almost every crisis elsewhere in the Middle east makes life here a little worse. Gaza is run by Hamas, an Islamist militant organization which is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. So at one point, Hamas appeared to be navigating the treacherous cross currents of the Arab Spring, effortlessly able to count at different points on the support of Syria, Egypt and Iran, all powerful regional players. Now, through a combination of misjudgment and misfortune, it can count on none of them. So this is a desperate time for Hamas. Without allies, and especially without a regime in Egypt prepared to turn a blind eye to weapons smuggling, the organization suddenly seems friendless in times of peace. It has no diplomatic cards to play against the Israeli government. When violence flares, as it has done this month, it can at least demand concessions in return for agreeing to stop. Again, these confrontations are hopelessly asymmetrical. Many of Hamas rockets are out of date or homemade, where Israel's weapons are powerful and sophisticated. And yet clear, decisive victory seems to elude Israel, just as it eludes Hamas. The fighting will probably end in ways which are unsatisfactory to both and ambiguous, just as it has in the past. Now that will be tough on the civilians of southern Israel, who will almost certainly eventually find themselves running for their air raid shelters again. But it will be tougher still on those children on the roof next door. They have no air raid shelters and very little chance of escaping to the wider world as long as Israel and Egypt maintain strict controls on all movement across Gaza's borders. So these thoughts do not end with some neat aphorism which offers a little hope for the future. You just wonder how long it will be before those children who've lived through their three wars find themselves living through a fourth. And you wonder what will become of them.
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Kevin Connolly the start of the First World War wasn't the only newsworthy event of 1914. Exactly a hundred years ago, the very first ship to pass through the Panama Canal was making its historic voyage. The waterway was, and still is, an astounding feat of engineering. And it went on to revolutionise global trade. Ships no longer had to make the long and treacherous journey round the southern tip of South America. Instead, the passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic Atlantic Ocean would take less than a day. The canal was controlled by the United States until the Panamanian government took it over in 1999. And as Katie Watson has been finding out, it forged a unique relationship between the tiny Central American country and its superpower neighbour to the north.
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I've never seen anything quite like it. There I was, stood at the side of the canal, watching a towering car transporter as it prepared to enter the first set of locks. The this was an immense hunk of metal, as tall as a 10 story building and well over 200 metres long. It didn't look like it would fit through the gap, but sure enough, with help from tugboats which lined it up, the ship crept forward into the channel and the gates closed behind. There were just inches between the ship and the stone wall of the lock chamber. No matter, it glided through like a dream. It's not just the awesome scale of these ships that impresses the the workings of the canal are like a living museum. The 30 meter deep lock gates are the exact same ones that were installed when the Americans built it. And inside the control room is the original console that was used to operate the canal, complete with shiny handles that opened and closed the gates and manual water level gauges too. There's no use for it now, of course. Computers have long taken over, but the fact that it's still there shows Panama is proud of this legacy that the US left behind. I went to meet Alberto Alaman Zubieta. A smartly dressed man in linen trousers and a light shirt, Alberto ran the waterway until 2012. He was in charge during the transition to Panamanian control. The canal is a religion that unites all Panamanians, he told me. But it wasn't always easy. With the US, there was often resentment over its presence, and in 1964, it boiled over to a tragic degree. It started over the disagreement about a Panamanian flag being placed in the Canal Zone, an area then operated by the American military. It ended in riots and 21 deaths. The incident saw Panama break relations with the US, but Alberto said it was a turning point, too. The tragedy hastened negotiations to hand over the canal to the Panamanians. Alberto was full of wonderful stories. He told me about the time when a US nuclear submarine came through the canal. Every ship, military or civilian, has to give over control to one of the canal's highly trained pilots, who steer it through the locks. This one time, the US submarine captain was not happy about doing so. As the submarine entered the canal, the pilot gave instructions to go full speed into the lock chamber, a command that the captain disagreed with. Fearful it could cause a serious accident, the pilot ignored his protestations and repeated full power ahead. It was a stressful moment for everyone, says Alberto. But in the end, the submarine went through much to everyone's relief. The American captain may have known his submarine, said Alberto, but he didn't know the canal, its currents and water flow. I couldn't help thinking that Alberto was particularly proud that Panama was, for once, teaching the US how to do things, not the other way round. Latin America has often had a love hate relationship with the us. This region is a heavy consumer of American culture. Politically, though, there's a feeling that the US exerts too much influence. It's a feeling that Fanny, a young Panamanian I met during my trip, shared. I asked her what she thought of America. I'm American too, she said defiantly, explaining that America is a continent that, not a country. For her, the very word America gives ownership of the region to the us, and that's something she disagrees with strongly. Perhaps, I suggested, English speakers are just lazy and can't be bothered to say the United States of America in full. So he shorten it. But that didn't placate her at all. To her, it just shows the degree of influence the US has over the countries below it. Despite the frustrations, nobody I met, not even Fanny, saw the canal as a bad thing. Yes, there's a huge gap between rich and poor, and certainly the money coming from the canal is not evenly distributed. But nobody disagrees with the fact that the canal has worked wonders for the country's economy, and the US has had a role in bringing that about. But Panamanians want to move on. What's important is now. Eric Liu, who is one of the canal's maintenance managers, is definitely a believer in that. He started on the canal as an apprentice 26 years ago under US management. He loved working under the Americans, but says it's much better now that the waterway is a profitable business for Panama, not just a US military operation. It was a myth that Panamanians couldn't handle the canal, he said. But we've showed the world we can do it and do it well. Maybe some people, he added with a big, beaming smile, adjust a little bit jealous.
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And that's Katie Watson now. Across the formerly Communist world, people still talk about the bad old days of shortages, the empty shelves, the endless queuing and searching for goods. In most places, that's all in the past. But Cuba still has its one party state and its ration books. It's still no shopper's paradise. You can spend days combing Havana trying to find, say, a shower curtain, a dozen eggs or a fluorescent light bulb. The extreme poverty of the early 1990s, after the USSR broke up and stopped subsidizing Cuba, has now ebbed a bit. It means there's more food around, and even if you can't find something in the shops, there's often a black market connection which can sort you out. But as Sarah Rainsford tells us from Havana, shopping for everyday life remains a challenge, so a chance to travel off the island is especially important.
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The bright orange bottle of cleaning fluid was probably the oddest item stuffed into my suitcase, this time wedged in beside the tennis shoes for one friend and a pile of baby grows for another. It's a ritual I've grown used to. Every time you leave Communist run Cuba, with its centrally planned economy and sparsely stocked stores, you go shopping. But as I packed my bags last week to head back to Havana, I did a double take. I was in Moscow, heading home from a work trip and, as usual, carrying as many presents and supplies as I could. And yet, it wasn't so long ago that I'd stock up in the same way for trips to Russia. I was a student there in the early 1990s, as the country emerged very painfully from over seven decades of communism. The shops then were stomach achingly bare. My friends and I would head out each day with empty bags to scour the shelves of gloomy, musty stores. We got used to buying whatever there was, not what we wanted pickled tomatoes, perhaps, or canned fish on a good day. But the new Moscow I visited last week is chock full of shopping malls, its streets lined with global brands and coffee chains. My closest friend there, Natasha, now makes most of her purchases with a few taps on her iPad. When I told Natasha about my mad shopping dash for Cuba, we remembered her own first trip abroad. Britain, a year before the Soviet Union disintegrated. My mother had taken her out one day for the weekly food shop. I remember there were all these different cheeses and ten types of everything. Natasha laughed, recalling her first encounter with a Western supermarket. At first I was excited. Then I started crying my eyes out. We've forgotten what things used to be like here, she admitted as we stood chatting close to a branch of McDonald's and a mobile phone shop. We definitely take all this for granted. In Natasha's childhood, it was Soviet subsidies that kept Cuba's economy afloat. This tropical island was Moscow's ideological ally, right on America's doorstep. But in the post Soviet 1990s, after that subsidy lifeline was severed, Cubans suffered badly. A friend in Havana told me she wound up in hospital. Once there was no fuel for public transportation and she was eating so little she collapsed trying to pedal her bike to work. In today's Cuba, if you have money, you won't go hungry. A series of economic reforms that began as a post Soviet survival mechanism, have slowly expanded. People are now free to run small businesses, creating a growing number of private cafes and restaurants. And as farmers no longer have to sell everything they produce to the state, those restaurant owners can now get supplies straight from the source. They bypass the state distribution network that's notorious for its inefficiency. Yet despite Cuba's proximity to the U.S. washington's five decade old trade embargo, supposed to squeeze this island's communist government from power, means there's no American investment here. There's no Starbucks, no Coca Cola plant. Some might see that as a good thing. But they mightn't find shopping for essentials quite so quaint. I once approached my big local supermarket full of optimism. I now know I'm likely to find a mixture of half bare shelves and one stacked with a single product. Cheap ketchup, say, or adult incontinence pads. Basic items disappear whenever Cuba struggles to meet its import bills. For weeks there was no toilet paper or cartons of milk. Now even the delicious local coffee is lost, as Cubans say, mind you, there's plenty of partridge in brine, should anyone fancy that. I've seen the same pile of cans on display for over two years at $20 apiece. Perhaps the central planner ticked the wrong order box. So, partridge aside, overseas travel can become one frantic shopping run. There's so much demand for everything here that travellers known as mules will hand carry all sorts of goods into Cuba for sale. Though the government's begun cracking down on the illicit shuttle trade on a smaller scale, having family and friends who can shop abroad has become a vital resource for many. When I told our cameraman I was off to Russia, he laughingly suggested I bring back some spare parts for his ancient car. A larder. Apart from the battered, beautiful American classics of the 1950s, the boxy, Soviet made Lada is still the most common sight on Cuba's rutted roads. It's lucky I didn't make him any promises, though. It turns out things in Russia really have changed. The smooth streets of Moscow are now rammed full of four wheel drives and sleek saloon cars. And I only saw one larder the entire week. My friend Natasha spotted it and sent me a photograph.
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Sarah Rainsford there the Somali president has asked Somalis living abroad not to raise money for the Al Shabaab militant group. The Somalia based organisation has been blamed for a string of bombings and shootings, most of them in East Africa. The president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud, who was speaking on a visit to the United States, also called on parents to make sure their children weren't being brainwashed by the militants. Like other jihadist groups around the world, Al Shabaab now uses film and social media to get its message across. It also likes to keep in touch with journalists like Mary Harper, our Africa editor, who regularly reports on Somalia.
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The other morning I woke up to a text message and missed call from Al Shabaab. As always, the message was written in perfect English. It informed me about a film Al Shabaab has made called beyond the Shadows. It said the film gave an accurate portrayal of what happened when French commandos last year tried and failed to rescue a suspected French intelligence agent held hostage by the group. This was the latest in a whole series of calls and text messages I've received from the militants. Scrolling through these texts on my phone, I can chart the history of Al Shabaab attacks. One, written in the style of a news agency report, claims responsibility for an attack on a restaurant in Djibouti. Popular with foreigners, or as Al Shabaab calls them, Western crusaders. I've seen Al Shabaab's violence at close hand. Earlier this year, I was just a few buildings down from the Jazira palace hotel in the Somali capital Mogadishu, when it was attacked first by one suicide car bomber, then another. The second one had waited for the emergency services to arrive before driving his vehicle into them and the hotel to ensure maximum casualties. The blasts from the exploding cars were huge. Bullets cracked down the street as the security forces tried to beat the back Al Shabaab fighters who'd come in a minibus. I was told to try to storm the hotel. In the middle of all this, the main target of the attack, a senior security official, came with his entourage to the place where I was. We set up a circle of chairs for them, and they sat there like statues in stunned, stony silence. I sometimes find it difficult to relate these acts of extreme and terrifying violence to the calm, measured voice of the Al Shabaab official on the other end of the phone, to the precise, clinical wording of those text messages. What started as brief calls about particular attacks have developed into longer, wider discussions about the movement's practices and philosophies. Sometimes there's room for debate. But when I ask about certain subjects, the treatment of spies or adulterers, for example, the tone of voice becomes cold and mechanical, as if the words are learned by rote. I had the conversation about spies One lazy Sunday morning when I was still in bed. I got a call from Al Shabaab. And as I sat in my safe, comfortable bedroom, I heard about how if you're found guilty of spying, there's only one punishment you will face. The firing squad. In a public place, everybody must witness the killing of a spy. The spy must receive three, four or five bullets to the head. But perhaps the strangest conversation I had was one sunny day outside the Houses of Parliament in London. I was due to attend an event there, but as I was early, I was sitting in a park outside, in the shade of those grand buildings, my phone rang. I saw the words Al Shabaab flash onto my screen. What started as an update on the latest attack on the Kenyan coast ended up as a lecture about my faith. Have you thought about the afterlife? Asked the official. You know, Mary, you won't be around in 20, 30, 40 years time. I seriously recommend you consider converting to Islam. This man seemed genuinely concerned as he urged me in a gentle voice to take up the Muslim faith. As he spoke, images of people I know or have known who've been caught up in Al Shabaab attacks flashed before my eyes. Some of them are now dead. Others have suffered horrific physical injuries. Like a politician I met who was caught up in an explosion, whose black skin is now mottled with raw, angry, bright pink scars. Who can't now hear anything because of the damage the blast has done to his ears. Or those who haven't got any physical scars but who jump every time they hear a bang, even if it's just a door closing. Who shudder when they walk past a parked car in Mogadishu, afraid it might explode. Whose hearts miss a beat whenever someone they don't know approaches them for fear they might be a suicide bomber. Who, like me, have received texts from Al Shabaab. Only the nature of their messages is very different. They often contain death threats. I never quite know when I'm going to receive the next message from Al Shabaab. I might be on holiday with family, having supper with friends, when all of a sudden a text message will burst onto my screen, bringing two very different worlds into sharp collision.
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And with that from our Mary Harper. Time's up. More dispatches from reporters far and wide next Saturday morning. I hope you'll join us then. Goodbye.