← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
A War Getting Worse
00:28:23
Lyse Doucet's in a Syrian suburb hearing stories about a civil war which is reaching...
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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, the Damascus bubble breaks. Civil war arrives in the very heart of the Syrian capital. The Russians worried, their patriarchs leading his flock closer to the authorities than to God. Messrs. Obama and Romney. Are they wasting their time wooing America's don't knows? And who's for boiled duck fetus? Why the food of the Philippines is having an image makeover there's been more fierce fighting in Syria's second city, Aleppo. Several thousand rebel fighters are said to have been involved in running battles with the security forces. As the conflict continues, there's mounting Western pressure at the UN General assembly for Russia and China to ease their opposition to international action against President Bush. In Aleppo, residents report savage fighting in areas which up to now have been relatively peaceful. And Lise Doucet, just back from Syria, says it's clear more and more parts of the country are being caught up in the rebellion.
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On the wide canvas of a country at war, sometimes the smallest of places can tell the bigger story. For me, that place is Barze. You might struggle to find it on a map, but on my human map of Syria, this suburb of Damascus looms large. I've gone to what seems like a very ordinary neighbourhood on all my recent visits. Each time, it told an extraordinary story. The people I met in Barsee didn't want to tell me their names. They didn't want their identities known. But their acts of courage told me a lot about them, about Barsey, about Syria. My first visit there was about a year ago. Damascus then was described as a bubble, a city largely untouched by the growing protests in other parts of Syria. The capital, a stronghold of the regime, was heavily protected, policed by ubiquitous intelligence services. Any protest was forcibly suppressed. In Barzeh, fear was palpable. As we stood outside the main mosque, the rare presence of foreign journalists drew a crowd, but they kept their distance from our microphones, gesturing with eyes or hands to tell us they couldn't speak. Then one man pressed a wad of crumpled paper into a colleague's hand. It read like this, thank you, but no one can meet with you because the army is in the street. All people are afraid, another man whispered as he brushed past me. Look down that road. Syrian troops lay in wait. Six months ago, I went back to Barsay to the mosque. An old man coming through the gate waved us on. Don't ask me what's happening. Go talk to the young people down the road. I looked down that road. Troops no longer circled the area. A few young men motioned to us down that road. Inside the neighborhood, we found a place where fear had had gone. Men, women, and children filled the narrow warren of alleys, marching, shouting slogans against President Assad. They urged us to keep following them until we came to a house riddled with gunfire and gaping holes. A house they said was used by the armed opposition, the Free Syria army, until the government attacked it. Syria's war had reached the suburbs, and now, six months on, it's reached the very heart of Damascus. On my latest visit, I found a different city every day. Plumes of black and white smoke billowed across a bright Syrian sky. You can hear shelling night and day, explosions, sirens. Some neighborhoods still retain their fabled charm. Manicured parks where families picnic and young couples flirt. Glittering shops of spices and sweets. Cafes full of chatter. But other neighborhoods now lie in blackened ruin. The Damascus bubble is broken. Our repeated requests to the government to visit areas coming under bombardment were denied. It's too dangerous, we were told. Your protection is our priority. Then one night, I heard Barze was coming under attack. I insisted we should at least be allowed to go there. So we went back to Barsee, to the same mosque, the same road. This time, a group of soldiers manned a checkpoint right in front of the mosque. They welcomed us, but told us we could go no further. The situation is fine, one man said. Another indicated with a flip of his hand that he wasn't so sure. They said we could talk to people close to the checkpoint, but they shadowed us, told the shopkeeper what to say. But yet again, Barze still found a way to tell me its story. First it was the mosque. The loudspeaker rang out, announcing funerals. Two people it said had been killed in violence the day before. And then I walked on my own down the largely empty road as far as I could without being called back by the troops. A young woman and her son stood at the roadside. How is everything? I asked the mother. Fine, she said. But then her young son boldly interrupted her. You should tell her, he insisted with an assertiveness that belied his years. The helicopters attacked yesterday. We are staying in our houses because we're really scared. We're begging them to stop. And yet, he said, there were still protests here. Then they had to go. And so did I. Out of Barsey, back into the heart of a city to torn between those who still back the president and fight for him and those who don't and fight against him. That's Syria today. Everyone has a story, and it's a story of a war that gets worse. That's what Barzeh tells me.
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Lise Doucet, now back from Damascus. The first of the presidential debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney takes place next week. The hope on both sides is that in what still looks like a tight race, their man will say something that appeals to the small number of people who still haven't decided how to vote. Justin Webb, who saw two presidential elections when he was our correspondent in Washington, says too much attention's focused on the nation's don't knows I must have cut
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a very strange figure on Miami beach the other day. It was very hot, sparkling sunshine, glorious waves, blue. But I was not dressed for the beach. I was making a film for Newsnight and wearing a formal shirt and what one rather unkind correspondent described as BBC trousers chinos with lots of pockets. I had a microphone receiver jammed into a belt and I was running madly, helter skelter up and down the beach looking for my lost wallet. After 10 minutes, I was soaking and panting and and still without it. Thinking it was gone for good, I dried off, addressed the camera and went back to our hotel. The next day I received a tweet. It was a picture of my wallet sent by a Mexican woman who had found it discarded in some bushes near the beach and had taken it back to Mexico with her. She had looked me up on Twitter and was happy to send it back. Now this is a story of kindness and the usefulness of modern communications, but it's also a story of action. The woman who found my wallet took a decision I will take it home with me and used her initiative to find me. She is plainly a person who knows what she thinks is right and wrong and is willing to act on it. How refreshing. And how unlike a certain group of people over whom the American media tend to slaver at this time of a presidential race, but who, in my opinion, deserve much less attention than they get the undecided voters. During my Florida trip, I met a man walking his dog who told me very proudly that he was still to be convinced by either candidate this year. They're going to have to work harder, he said. Then he told me in the course of a conversation about America's space program that 911 had happened because America had lost its domination of space. If America was still sending people to the moon. He said Osama bin Laden was would have held back. Well, that conversation summed up for me the two aspects of America's undecided voters that I dislike the most. First, they're so used to being fawned over that they've become quite arrogant. They want to be seduced by the politicians spoken to personally. They have a babyish desire to have their tummies tickled. It's all about them. Secondly, they are often really stupid. The American media often suggest that these Einsteins are programming their computer like mental machinery with so many wickedly abstruse arguments and counter arguments for each candidate that it's simply and naturally and wonderfully taking a long time to come up with the result. Oh, pull the other one. I remember back in 2008 reading somewhere an interview with an undecided voter who was asked more about her life. Well, she said she liked cats and but she'd been thinking about getting a dog. How long for? Five years. I rest my case. As one of America's wisest political commentators put it, undecided voters are the kind of people who, when eating pickles, get their heads stuck in the jar. There is a staggering amount of political ignorance in America, but let us not lionize the Ivy League of ignoramuses, those who can see at this moment no difference between Obama and and Romney. And let us hope too that the candidates do not pander to these folk. It made me wince to see Romney on some idiotic TV programme the other day talking about his technique for getting toothpaste out of a tube. He didn't want to be there, but his advisors will have suggested it as a way of getting to the undecided who spend a lot of their time watching daytime tv. The President's advisers tell him the same thing and he takes the same notice, preferring on the first day of the General assembly of the United nations to be on junk TV instead of meeting work world leaders. Let's hope in the presidential TV debates they abandon that nonsense and set out competing visions and thrill and enthuse Americans who have bothered to think about politics and have a view, a passion. Yes, it's true that political partisanship and the nastiness that can come with it is at what feels like an all time high in America. But being certain about what you think and being unable to compromise are not the same thing. The American media often failed to grasp that. And here's a practical point. Only just over half of Americans will vote in this presidential election. Getting your own core supporters to the polls ought to be enough to win it if the candidates only had the courage to forget all this middle ground bilge. I wonder if that woman has made her getting a dog decision yet. Whatever it is or is not, I'm glad that neither she normal nor any other undecided voter found my wallet.
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And that's Justin Webb. The three members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot, jailed for their anti President Putin protest in Moscow's main cathedral, are to appeal against their sentences on Monday. There's been much discussion about why their 42nd high kicking performance aroused such fierce reactions. Russia is a secular state, even if the church increasingly portrays itself as intrinsic to national identity. The head of the church, Patriarch Kirill, has made no secret of his strong support for Putin, praising his leadership as a miracle of God and describing the punk prayer as part of an assault by enemy forces. Lucy Asch has been to the president's favourite monastery by a lake in northern Russia to explore the apparent growing influence of the Orthodox Church.
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Now there are fewer boats coming in. Thank God we'll get some peace and quiet. End of season talk from a worn out hotel manager, you might think. But Mikhail Akulinovic isn't a typical hotelier. He wears a black habit instead of a shirt and tie, and these days he's known as Father Matvey. His hotel isn't typical either. Housed inside the 14th century Transfiguration Monastery on the rocky island of Vallam in in Lake Ladoga, Father Matvey rises every morning at half past four and spends three hours in church before checking his bookings and welcoming new guests. Despite its remoteness, 120,000 pilgrims, tourists and VIPs flock here each year. I wondered why he had come here after spending most of his life as an airline pilot. He fished under his habit and pulled out a long, slightly greasy ribbon embroidered with quotations from Psalm 91 My refuge and my fortress. My mother worried about my safety and wanted me to wear a cross, he said, but I couldn't. We pilots had to strip off all the time for medicals, and in those days we were all supposed to be atheists. So Father Matvey's mother stitched the psalm through the ribbon and sewed it into the lining of her son's Aeroflot jacket. He wore it just to humor her, until one day the engines on his small plane cut out. I remembered the ribbon and silently prayed. Somehow the co pilot and I managed to land and we walked away without a scratch. If I hadn't prayed and acted so fast, we'd have died and we might have killed people on the ground, too. A decade later, Father Matvey cheated death a second time when he nearly crashed a cargo plane in Peru. It was pilot error, he said matter of factly. And that time I cried out, lord, save me. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s, he began attending church, teaching the Bible to children and going on pilgrimages. Then, five years ago, he left the airport and his wife to join the brothers on Valaam. His wife, herself a churchgoer, raised no objections. But not every monk on the island has such an understanding family. With his beard and round glasses, Father Josef may look like a St. Petersburg intellectual, but his English has a New York twang. Aged 16, he decided he wanted to become a monk. His father, who ran a furniture company, was horrified and packed him off to business school in the States, hoping to knock some sense into him. As you can see, said Father Joseph, that didn't work. His mother and father have now embraced Orthodoxy themselves and recently got remarried by a priest. In the old days, parents used to bring their children to church. Now it's the other way around. He said Young monks like Father Joseph embody the renaissance of Russian Orthodoxy after almost a century of communism. But it's not just the church he's committed to. He shows me a small copy of the Mother of God of Valaam, the monastery's most famous icon. An inscription underneath notes that it was sent into space and orbited the Earth 488 times. Whose idea was that? I asked. Father Joseph suggested the decision was taken at the very highest level and mentioned that President Vladimir Putin is a frequent visitor to the island. He's our benefactor, a person who provides aid in all possible ways to our monastery. I asked him about a film of another Valaam monk attempting to kiss Putin's hand, which went viral on the Internet this summer. Is the president a holy man? I wondered. Only God knows that, said Father Iosef, beginning to sound a bit tetchy. Why are you so interested? Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has his own residence on the island, on a pine clad promontory, the next to the newly built church of St. Vladimir. Many Russians worry that the current patriarch is leading his flock closer to the authorities rather than God. Some have even likened the Orthodox Church to the Communist Party, a mechanism to stifle dissent and force obedience to an authoritarian regime. The jailed members of Pussy Riot say their performance on the altar of Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow was prompted by illegitimate elections and Patriarch Kirill's endorsement of the current president. One of those young women, Maria Aleochina, is herself an Orthodox believer. From her prison cell, she wrote, I thought the church loves all its children, but it seems it only loves those who vote for Putin.
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Lucy Ash in northern Russia and you can hear the documentary she made there on Monday evening. That's here on Radio 4 at 8 o'. Clock. Confrontational and rough. That's the verdict on the last few weeks of election campaigning from outside observers sent in to monitor next week's presidential polls In Georgia, each side's faced bitter criticism. The authorities in this former Soviet state have been engulfed in rows over the torture of prisoners and the detention of opposition activists, while those opposing Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili have been accused of trying to buy the election. The president, who will have learned how his people voted by Tuesday morning, will certainly hope he's garnered some votes. Along his country's Black sea coast, Damian McGuinness has been to the seaside town of Batumi, which in recent years has been transformed into a thriving tourist hotspot.
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When you're in Batumi, it's hard to believe that this was once a corrupt and crime ridden city, cut off from the rest of the country and run as a personal fiefdom by a power hungry strongman. Today, the palm trees are illuminated in neon, fountains are bathed in red and green spotlights and hotels flash like Christmas tree lights. Subtlety is not something you see much of in these parts. But then this once dark and impoverished corner of the former Soviet Union is now being touted as the Las Vegas of the Black Sea. Just as Las Vegas likes to build larger than life imitations of Paris or Rome in a confusingly circular way, Batumi is attempting presenting its own rather bizarre copy of Las Vegas. More aspirational members of the Georgian government would prefer to draw comparisons with Monte Carlo, but all the flashing lights and slot machines make me think more of 1980s Blackpool, near where I grew up in rainy north west England, minus, of course, the sticks of rock and the donkeys. I don't think that's an analogy I'll be seeing in the official tourist brochures here anytime soon, particularly since Pothumi's target market is not people like me with a weird nostalgia for damp English seaside towns, but rather gamblers from Turkey. 20 minutes drive away, where gambling is banned. Turkish flags wave proudly outside the new casinos and casino owners say up to 70% of all the tourists in Batumi come to gamble and that at the weekends more than half of the guests at the Roulette wheels or blackjack tables are Turkish. Over the centuries, this region was repeatedly invaded by Turks. Now Georgia is doing everything it can to lure them back. Passport controls crossing from Turkey into Georgia have been eased, meaning Turkish tourists can cross for an evening's flutter, showing just an ID card. Local shopkeepers say they are thrilled that the regional economy appears to be booming. But on the other side of the border in Turkey, people are a bit more ambivalent, where one Turkish labourer says he's now addicted and that he comes every other day after work to gamble. Otherwise he feels sick. He has neighbours in the village who have lost their businesses because of gambling debts. And in local mosques in Turkey, religious leaders say gambling is turning into a plague which is destroying families, something many wives would probably agree with. According to the Turkish Embassy in Georgia, Turkish women regularly phone up the consul in Batumi, asking for help to find their husbands in the casinos. But considering what the situation was like here just a decade ago, the boom in tourism is impressive. This region was run by a corrupt clan headed by Aslan Abashidza, seen by some as a strong man who saved the region from the chaos of 1990s Georgia, but described by others as a mafia boss who was involved in organized crime but backed up by his own personal army. Getting into the territory then meant passing numerous checkpoints, passport controls and inevitably paying bribes. Abhishida's son was rumoured to regularly close off the promenade, the only stretch of road without potholes, to race his Lamborghini up and down. When President Saakashvili swept to power in Georgia proper after the 2003 Rose Revolution, he vowed to win back this stray territory. There were fears of civil war, but that was averted when Abishidza fled to Moscow. And although he still faces 15 years in prison for embezzlement if he ever comes back to Georgia and has even been charged with murder. The region around Batumi has become a model for how once breakaway territories can be reintegrated and made to prosper. So President Saakashvili's government today likes to hold up Batumi as a lure for people in Georgia's two rem breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which, despite being backed by Russia, still show the scars of war and have little of the glitz of Batumi. A bit like how, before 1989, the US would show off the shining shop windows of capitalist West Berlin to dark communist East Germany on the other side of the Wall. So probably best if Georgia sticks to the Las Vegas or Monte Carlo analogies. I doubt talking about the joys of a Georgian Blackpool would quite do the Same job.
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Damian McGuinness on the shores of the Black Sea in Georgia. Now Thailand, India, Japan, China. In fact, almost every country in Asia has a distinctive and internationally acclaimed cuisine. But the Philippines seems to be a rare exception. Most people have never heard of Filipino food, and if they have, they might just tell you it's greasy, sweet and, well, not very nice. But our correspondent in Manila, Kate McGowan, wonders if it's just had a bad press. Perhaps it just needs better marketing.
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When I first told my friends that I was moving to the Philippines, they were instantly jealous. They were thinking of the tropical sun, the chance to dive to some of the world's best coral reefs, the white sandy beaches. But no one ever mentioned the food. And for most of my time here, I've also remained stoically silent about the cuisine. It's not hard to see why, on arrival in Manila, most people quickly assume this is a nation which lives on fast food, not content with the usual international chains. On every street corner, there are homegrown versions as well, and there's even one in which everything on the menu is made from Spam. Most street stores are unlikely to win any culinary awards either. The sausages are so pink they practically glow in the dark. Then there's the wonderfully named helmet, grilled chicken's head and Adidas, which are meant to resemble the three stripes on the sports store's logo. Neither of these seem to have widespread appeal among tourists. Nor does Betamax cubes of dried blood, which are thought to look like the old videotapes. As far as I'm concerned, they look about as appetizing as videotapes, too. Possibly the most difficult food for foreigners to stomach is balut boiled duck foetus, still in its egg, but just days from hatching. Yes, the beak and the feathers are fully formed, but the idea is that you ignore all that and gulp it down anyway. Within a few months of moving here, I'd decided, like many others before me, that eating nice food in the Philippines meant eating food that wasn't actually Filipino. But that's before I met some serious food lovers who persuaded me to give the national dishes another chance. I met chefs who extolled the virtues of a cuisine as vibrant as any in Asia, which mixes the influence of more than 300 years of Spanish colonialism with Malay and Chinese flavours. And, of course, the varied dishes of the 7,000 islands which make up the Philippine archipelago. There's the Sour sinigang soup, the Spanish inspired adobo stew and the coconut palm spring rolls or lumpia, and many other dishes incorporating the varied tropical fruits and vegetables available here. Admittedly, it was always going to be difficult for me as a vegetarian to love a cuisine that has so much pork in it that I have to specify that I don't eat meat or pig. Once a kindly waiter put some fried pork next to my plate, compliments of the chef, just in case I changed my mind during the meal. But if you look hard enough, there are plenty of options to suit different tastes and preferences. And it's not all fried either. There are salads and soups and roasts as well. The main problem seems to be that most people don't really investigate what Philippine cuisine has to offer. And that includes Filipinos as much as foreigners. Rolando Laudico is a flamboyant, long haired young chef who is passionate about his national cuisine and desperately wants to improve its image. He says that for centuries, Filipinos have been in the habit of apologizing for their food, telling guests they're sorry they couldn't offer anything better. It's seen as cheap, everyday fare rather than anything you'd eat out of choice. That's why so many of Mr. Laudico's friends cautioned him against opening a gourmet restaurant serving only Philippine food. No one will pay much to eat it, they told him. But he went ahead anyway and opened Bistro Filipino. So far, things are going well. It's packed out most nights and another outlet was opened last year because of the demand. Perhaps part of the reason for its success is that Chef Laudico has modernised traditional dishes, turning soups into stews, altering the presentation and holding off on the grease. In the process, he seems to have shed the image of Philippine food being the poor man's choice. How else could he have attracted one of his regular customers, Imelda Marcos, the widow of former President Ferdinand Marcos and a woman known only too well for her upmarket tastes. So perhaps it's restaurants like this which herald the future for Philippine cuisine. With better marketing and a bit of modernisation, it does have the potential to join the ranks of other Asian cuisines. But boiled duck fetus, I'm still not sure that has mainstream appeal.
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Well, it's certainly not made it to the BBC canteen menu. Kate McGowan with some choice morsels from Manila and bringing this edition to a close. I'll be back with more from our own correspondents. More from their dinner plates too, probably next week. Until then, goodbye.