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From Our Own Correspondent
BBC Radio 4
00:28:14
Why are America's new breed of soldiers studying philosophy? David Edmonds is in New...
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Hello, you're about to hear from our own correspondent. Jill McGivering hosts our latest World Service Edition. You can hear that by going to the BBC iPlayer. This though is the programme aired on BBC Radio 4. It's presented by Kate Ady.
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Today, like father, like son. A young Mubarak steps forward as presidential elections loom in Egypt. A breakthrough in the Balkans as Serbia softens its stance on breakaway Kosovo. We are in the classroom finding out why America's new breed of soldiers are studying philosophy. And a hole appears in the heart of Angola's capital as one of the city's best known landmarks is forced to close. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt has once again this week been centre stage in the Middle east, hosting the latest round of the Israeli Palestinian peace talks in the resort of Sharm El Sheikh. But the appearance of the 82 year old leader who has been in poor health, again set off speculation about the future and whether Mr. Mubarak will be fit enough to stand for re election in the presidential poll at the end of next year. There are various factions which might hope to step into any political vacuum. But Parr could shift to another Mubarak, the President's son. John Lyne has been following developments on the streets of the Egyptian capital, Cairo.
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It hasn't taken me long to learn that Cairo is not an early morning city. Even at the laundry I use, usually a paragon of hard work, there's no sign of anyone. Even at the Respectable hour of 10.30 in the morning. It's not until late in the evening that the city really wakes up. Then it will continue throbbing with life well into the early hours. The cafe tables out on the street are full of men smoking the hubbly bubbly, drinking tea and playing backgammon. Garishly lit shops continue selling toys or shoes, sweet pastries or plumbing supplies till well after midnight. Outside the riverboat restaurant nightclubs, I regularly see the queue of taxis collecting revellers when business finally ends as the sun rises. So it was that I found myself driving through the narrow and crowded streets of one of Cairo's poorest neighbourhoods to a political rally that didn't begin until after the final evening prayers had finished, echoing around from the surrounding mosques. Local politicians had spent money on posters, a video, a sound system and refreshments as their mass signatures for a popular campaign to persuade Gamal Mubarak, son of the president, to stand for the presidency himself. Now, if that sounds like a contradiction, well, it is. Gamal Mubarak is known as A child of privilege who's grown up in the Presidential Palace. He took his wife to Britain recently so they could have their child born there, rather than risking an Egyptian hospital. Yet the organisers of this popular upsurge told me they wanted him because Egypt needed change, or better still, to break out of control by the elite. No wonder there's a high degree of scepticism about exactly how spontaneous this campaign really is, or how much it has official backing. Hosni Mubarak has been in power now for 29 years. He says he's brought stability. Others say stagnation. Take the example of the lifts in my office building since I arrived. Two out of three of them have almost always been out of order. When I suggested taking a tougher approach with the landlord, I was told it wasn't quite that simple. The building itself was nationalised in the dramatic decade that followed the revolution of 1952. Then the government imposed rent controls. The only people who benefit from that now are the mostly wealthy sitting tenants, who pay just a few pounds a month for their tenancies, making a handsome profit subletting their apartments to people like us. So nobody has any incentive to spend money on maintenance. And the city centre is scarred by a series of beautiful old buildings rotting into decay. Similarly, the political system, born of a revolution 50 years ago is now characterized by the inability to change that plays out in widespread poverty, illiteracy and a shocking suicide rate, with around 5,000 people taking their lives every year as they give up on the battle to make ends meet. At another late night political meeting, I met the former UN nuclear chief and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei. He has returned to Egypt to lead a campaign to open up and democratize the political system. By contrast with the bemused crowd watching the Pro Gamal rally, Mr. ElBaradei's appearance attracts a throng of eager young people. One of them is using a tiny camera to send out a live webcast of the earnest question and answer session. Mr. ElBaradei insists that he is not a candidate for president. Even under a fair and free election, there would be doubts about how much popular support he could muster. In any case, under the present arcane rules, he is not eligible to stand. In fact, about the only remotely credible candidate who does fit the rubric is, surprise, surprise, Gamal Mubarak. It all appears to point in one direction. Yet another dynastic succession in the Arab world. But if we are now seeing a testing of the waters, there seems to be an enormous lack of self confidence about Gamal's possible candidacy? Are there splits in the ruling party? Is the military opposed? Is his father skeptical that his smart suited son has inherited his political nous and street savvy? What do the Americans think? Everyone knows the banned opposition Muslim Brotherhood is waiting in the wings, ready to test the young man, perhaps to destruction. In sum, for whatever reason, for the first time in decades, no one in Egypt has any idea what is going to happen next. But I can report that for a couple of brief days recently, all three lifts in my building mysteriously became operational. Though one of them does occasionally require a sharp kick to make it work.
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John Lyne in Cairo. Now the news, of course, is rarely cheerful. This morning it was rocket attacks in Kabul. On other days recently, bombings and killings in Pakistan, Iraq. For soldiers, each day, it seems, brings the most terrible dilemmas. What counts as a legitimate target? How can civilian deaths be avoided before they're sent to fight? You'd expect the military to be trained in weaponry, in tactics, in first aid. But as David Edmonds has been finding out, American forces are also receiving instruction in what is perhaps a surprising subject, philosophy.
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0800 hours, leave hotel and call Pressman. Jim. 8:20 park car to be met by Jim. It's the beginning of our schedule, which is set in stone, or at least in paper, with military precision. This is no surprise because we're at West Point, where future officers of the US army come to train. Timekeeping is a given, not a virtue. 8:40 to 9:25 attend class. 9:25 to 9:50 movement from class to Lincoln Hall. It's all very impressive and a little intimidating. At 0800 hours, I call Jim, as laid down in the schedule. Sorry, Jim says running late. He has a good excuse. It's sleeting heavily. West Point sits on the Hudson river, which tomorrow will look vast and beautiful as it meanders its way through the wilderness towards New York City. But today is barely visible. I'm here for a strange to see whether cadets would kill a fat man. Let me explain. There's a famous conundrum in moral philosophy. Imagine there's a runaway train, or in the American version, trolley. It's headed towards five people tied to the track. You're a bystander. If you do nothing, all five will die. But you could hit a switch and divert the train down a side track. Unfortunately, on that spur is one person, and if you turn this train, this person will die. What should you do? Turn the train. Most people think you should. But now imagine that same train is Again, headed towards five people. This time, you're watching from a footbridge. There's a fat man leaning over this footbridge. If you pushed him over, he'd land on the track and die. But his bulk would stop the train. So should you push the fat man? Almost nobody thinks you should. That's odd. Why might it be acceptable to turn the train and kill the man on the track, but not acceptable to push the fat man? And although all this may sound like a fun intellectual puzzle, the solution to the conundrum has implications in numerous practical areas, including warfare. All West Point cadets are now forced to study philosophy, including the so called trolley problem, a problem that continues to absorb some of the most brilliant minds in moral philosophy. These include Geoff McMahon of Rutgers University, who's also taught at West Point. You can see the kind of rigour and attention to detail required for philosophy as you watch the kindly Professor McMahon make tea. The tea has to be brewed at exactly 180 degrees Fahrenheit, he says. It is important that a McMahon cup of green tea is steeped for precisely six minutes. A timer is set in case the philosopher becomes preoccupied with other things. Once the tea is ready for consumption, McMahon forcefully makes the claim for the relevance of the trolley problem. It adds weight to a crucial moral distinction enshrined in international law, between killing civilians as an aim and knowing civilians will die merely as a foreseen consequence of military action. Between attacking a munitions factory, aware that there will be, to use that scandalous euphemism, collateral damage, and aiming at civilians intentionally. Back in the classroom, the new breed of philosopher soldiers are being taught. Immanuel Kant, who thought that there were some things it was always wrong to do to other humans, whatever the consequences and without whom the modern conception of human rights is almost inconceivable. This being a military school, the language has several pots more salt than you'll hear at a more traditional educational establishment today, lecturer Chris Case is explaining Kant's insights about lying and hypocrisy. He refers to a preacher from the 1980s. Remember that hellfire and brimstone guy? Says Chris. Well, when nobody was looking, he's in a bathtub with a hookah peeing on his head. The cadets snigger. Now, people got pretty mad at that, and not because they thought there was anything necessarily wrong with having a hooker pee on your head. It was that that SOB told me that I ought not to fool around with people I'm not married to. And he was doing it himself. It's hard to know how the 18th century German philosopher would respond to this updating of his philosophy outside the classroom. One officer, Major Danny Kazir, admits that there's a danger in teaching cadets to think reflectively for themselves, the danger of insubordination. But the risk is worth it, he says, because soldiers must not obey unjust commands. Philosophy can help them draw the necessary distinctions. His young soldiers may soon be required to serve in Afghanistan. They'll have to take snap decisions about what to target, when to shoot. Their moral instincts had to be trained alongside their military ones. And I watched Major Kazir smile with quiet satisfaction as we put the well known philosophical conundrum to the young cadets. And one by one, they told us why, in their carefully considered judgment, it would be quite wrong to push the fat man.
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David Edmonds in New York State there's been something of a diplomatic breakthrough in one of Europe's most bitterly contested corners. Kosovo was at the centre of the last conflict in the Balkans at the end of the 1990s. Nine years later, the province broke away from Serbia, but the issue was far from closed. Seventy countries have now recognized Kosovo's independence, but its Serb minority still doesn't. But could Serbia itself be starting, finally, to take a softer stance on its former province? Mark Loewen's been considering whether the beginning of the end of the Kosovo problem could now be in sight.
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It's a long and stuffy five hour bus ride south from the Serbian capital to Kosovo, dodging slightly too daring Balkan drivers and countless unfilled potholes. But getting into Kosovo is always the easy bit. It's traveling within the territory that is rather more complicated. On a recent trip, I arrived in the northern part of the city of Mitrovica. Most of its population ethnic Serbs. They fiercely resist the secession from Serbia in 2008 by Kosovo's Albanian majority. Serbian flags flutter above buildings and graffiti reading Kosovo is Serbia is still scrawled everywhere. It separated from the Albanian dominated south and beyond, the largest part of Kosovo by the River Ibar, a physical barrier dividing two hostile entities. Driving across the bridge becomes a problem because of that bit of metal on the front and back of a vehicle, the stamp of national affiliation. All cars in Kosovo must have Kosovan number plates. But in the north, where the Kosovan government still wields practically no authority, cars bear Serbian registrations. In general, they don't cross into the south, and no Kosovan registered cars come north for fear of attacks by disgruntled nationalists. But there is a trick removing the number plate altogether. And so when burdened by heavy equipment, I called a taxi from southern Mitrovica to pick me up on the northern side. I had to wait for the driver to perform his regular ritual, stopping by the bridge, unscrewing his number plate and then driving freely into the Serb held north with a black plateless bumper. It was clear what had been there before. But as long as the KS of the Republic of Kosovo isn't on show, nobody complains. It is one of the quirks of Balkan travel, certainly, but also so symbolic of the messy situation in which Kosovo is still mired. The majority of countries haven't recognized its independence and most Serbs don't engage with any Kosovan government institution. Kosovo was the seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church for many centuries. Serbs call it their Jerusalem. They are taught from childhood of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 when Serb heroes tried to defend Christian Europe from the Ottomans but lost. For this proud religious nation, it's hard to overstate kosovo's importance. But 10 days ago, the Serbian government made a historic shift. Belgrade had submitted a draft resolution to the UN General assembly in July rejecting the secession and calling question Kosovo's Future status. The US and 22 EU members that have recognized Kosovo reacted furiously, telling Serbia its own hopes of EU membership would be threatened if it didn't soften the draft. The stage was set for a major diplomatic confrontation, but after weeks of arm twisting by Brussels, Serbia changed the text at the eleventh hour to one instead urging dialogue with Kosovo. It was unanimously passed at the General Assembly. The story went less widely reported internationally than I'd anticipated. A head on clash between Serbia and the west would undoubtedly have excited headline writers more than the compromise that was reached. But in fact the end result was far more significant than a General assembly row because by dropping the challenge to Kosovo's status, by withdrawing the rejection of secession, by agreeing to the first face to face talks, Serbia has given up the diplomatic fight for Kosovo. And while Belgrade says it will never recognise the breakaway republic, it's clear that the government has now chosen its hopes of a European future over hanging on to Kosovo. London, Brussels and Washington reacted with delight. Serbia's EU application should be treated more rapidly, they said, because of the cooperation she has shown. A nationalist backlash has followed, with some calling the act treachery. Shame on Serbia, said the Serb leader in northern Kosovo. We should all become citizens of Russia, he added, because only Russia knows how to protect its people. But there have been no street demonstrations and the government hasn't fallen because for all the love of Kosovo. Most Serbs now see its independence as the status quo, and the prospect of a Serbian future within the European bloc as more precious still. As I loaded up the boot of my taxi in northern Kosovo, a little boy ran up to me, waving his arms. My friend. He cried in English, having overheard me on the phone. You are going over there? He asked, pointing to the Albanian south. When I nodded, his eyes widened. Don't, he warned. They'll kill you. I tried to reassure him, but he wouldn't listen. He was maybe 10 years old, the generation born of war and division. Perhaps it will simply take time for the mistrust and ignorance to fade, for more Serbs and Albanians to cross the river. But politicians needed to take the first step, and the government in Belgrade has now done just that.
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Mark Lewen A quarter century of civil war in Angola left the country's economy reeling, and attempts to revive it have been continuing ever since the conflict was brought to an end in 2002. An abundance of natural resources has helped the process of rebuilding. Angola has some of the richest oil and diamond deposits in the region. In the capital, Luanda, in particular, whole districts are being refurbished. But not all change is welcome. Roque Santero is one of the city's most famous and historic markets. Now it's being forced to close, and Louise Redvers says thousands of traders are being moved on.
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Rocky, Rocky, Rocky. San Kwanzas, the taxi boys would chant, hanging from the open doors of their blue and white minibuses, touting for trade. Named after a Brazilian soap opera, Rocsantero was the beating heart of Angola's informal economy and the main destination for the city's kandonghero taxis. In the television show, Roc Santero was the hero who rescued his city during Angola's decades of Marxist rule and civil war. The market was a similar sort of saviour. It sprung up in the 1980s, when only party officials had access to the shops. And even when those restrictions lapsed, you were guaranteed that however empty the shelves were in town, Rock Santerra would always have what you were looking for and more. One Angolan friend, now living in the United States, described Rock, which sprawled over a vast site alongside the city's port, as Luanda's first shopping mall. There may not have been air conditioning or cinemas, but it certainly sold anything and everything you ever wanted, from food, clothes, household items and cars, homebrew and contraband cigarettes and alcohol. It was arranged by sections shoes in one row, light bulbs in another, and, at the back, mini livestock areas where chickens, cows and goats were slaughtered to order and cooked in giant saucepans on charcoal fires lining the dark alleys. Currency traders and traditional moneylenders known as kishigilas would sit hissing at potential customers, waving wads of dollar bills in front of them, occasionally smiling to reveal a gold tooth. Young women in torn flip flops would stride through the litter strewn sand pathways, sleeping babies hanging from their backs and buckets of soap powder and vegetables balanced on their heads. They would call out the prices in a deep guttural tone, their voices merging with the sound of distorted speakers blasting out pirate CDs, the rattle of sewing machines where tailors, usually from the Democratic Republic of Congo, made clothes to order, and the high pitched screech of motorbikes which weaved precariously through the crowds. Those voices of motorbikes have been silenced now, the music switched off and the sewing machines packed away, replaced by the whir of bulldozers which had moved in to flatten the land after the provincial government of Luanda called time on the market. Now all that is left of the famous Roc Santero is a litter strewn wasteland where children play among the broken glass and dogs run wild. The authorities say the market had to be closed down because it was cramped and unhygienic, a den of organized crime and prostitution. According to officials, the land is to be urbanised as part of what politicians here call the the requalification of an area where millions live in overcrowded slum conditions, without access to water or sanitation. Cynics, however, say the motive behind the closure was to reclaim this prime real estate for the development of luxury homes with Atlantic views. Some of Rocky's women traders I spoke to in the days before the closure had tears in their eyes. Many had been selling there for decades. Rocky is our mother and our father, one told me. This is our space, the space of the people, and now they will take it away from us. A brand new market has been built 12 miles north of the city and has just opened to traders for the first time. I went up to Pangila to see the new facilities which were impressive. An organized single entrance, car parks, a police and medical post, banks, running water, electricity and plenty of space. But the road is still under construction and it took me a good two hours to navigate the traffic and potholes to get there. When I did finally arrive, there was chaos at the entrance with schools of women still queuing to get registered for their stall. Those vendors who had managed to register and were already selling said they liked the new market, but it was just too far from the city. One complained he'd got up at 4am to beat the traffic and and it had cost him the equivalent of four pounds to get there by taxi compared to the 50 pence he used to pay to reach the old market. I like the place, he told me. It's clean and feels safe. But the road is not good and I wonder whether any customers will really want to come here. The markets administrator shrugged off the complaints when we met for a short interview in his comfortable, air conditioned office, tucked away from the hubbub of the markets stalls. He said the road would be fixed in time and that Rocky couldn't have carried on how it was. The people had to accept change. Driving back past the desolate plot where Rocky once throbbed and thrived, there seemed to be more than just a gap in the landscape.
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Louise Redvers in Luanda, Angola Monday sees the start of the annual summit in New York of some 150 world leaders. This year, as well as the usual UN General assembly meeting, there's a special gathering to look at the state of world poverty. The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, says $100 billion worldwide is still needed if the planned targets outlined in the so called Millennium Development Goals are to be reached by 2015. Bridget Kendall has attended many of the global summits that have tried to address the poverty problem over the last decade, and she says it's remarkable how economic realities underpinning the DEB changed.
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Have you ever played that game where you ask someone what they were doing at a pivotal point in history? That November day in 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated? Or that night in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down? Well, I bet few would pick the date of September 6th of the year 2000 as worth remembering. No, not September 11th, 2001. That terrifying, cataclysmic moment when the Twin Towers collapsed and etched a vision of horror on all our consciousnesses. I'm talking about the year before, also in New York, but less visually dramatic. This was when the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, opened his Millennium Summit of the United Nations. At the time, it was the largest gathering of world leaders there'd ever been a hundred heads of state, three crown princes and getting on for 50 prime ministers, all gathered to consider the challenges of the century ahead. And I can tell you where journalists like me were burrowing through tapes and tangled wires in the dusty basement of the UN Building, struggling to find out about speeches being made in the General assembly above. Computer connections not working, no wireless handheld devices to help you out. It makes Me feel quite hot and anxious just to think of it a decade later. Covering UN summits is less of a technological battle. The challenge now is not how to get at the news, but how to keep a relentless deluge of information at bay. But the bigger change is how the global agenda has altered. Look at what dominated at that summit. Near the top came the pressing need for more UN peacekeepers to curtail conflicts and atrocities. War crimes in the Balkans and Rwanda were still recent memories. No hint yet of the problems of Iraq and Afghanistan. There was a post Cold War preoccupation with loose nukes, though not yet an obsession with Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction or worries about Iran's nuclear program. International terrorism was 1 on a list of other threats. 911 was still the stuff of science fiction. Climate change was noted, but not yet with alarm. The cracking icebergs of Greenland and Antarctica had yet to reach our TV screens. And centre stage was poverty reduction, with the crowning achievement of the summit, a set of pledges to halve by 2015 the number of people in abject poverty alongside a number of other targets. Millennium girls have had a rocky ride five years on. In 2005, there was a worry that enthusiasm had waned and pledges weren't being acted upon. An attempt to persuade leaders at a new UN summit to make their promises even more ambitious wasn't successful. George W Bush's administration even wanted to get rid of the phrase Millennium Development Goals altogether. But that same year, Tony Blair's Gleneagle summit did push poverty reduction to the top of the G8 agenda. The world's richest and biggest Western powers agreed to double aid by 2010 and cancel the debts of some of the poorest countries. The Make Poverty History campaign reminded everyone that wealthy nations had it in their power to make a difference. If money indulged on fizzy water or expensive perfume was channelled into aid instead, what an impact it would have. And now here we are at another milestone. September 2010. The message the summit in New York on Monday will be Stark. The 2015 deadline is approaching fast and another hundred billion dollars is needed if there's a hope of reaching the targets. Many Western nations, worried about budget deficits, no longer feel generous. Britain has ring fenced aid, but others have slipped on their pledges. G8 countries now lag $20 billion behind what they promised. But it's not all bad news. Child mortality rates have halved in much of the world. Numbers of children enrolling in primary schools have soared. The UN says the world is on track to meet its target for safe drinking water. And though not true for everyone, millions have been lifted out of abject poverty, not through Western aid, but because of extraordinary growth rates in countries like China, India and Brazil. Which begs a sobering thought. As the world shifts on its axis and economic clout moves from west to east and to the south, which countries will determine the fate of the globe in the future? The millennium started with Western powers, assuming they set the agenda. Not any longer. Where will we be in another 10 years?
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Where indeed? And with that question from Bridget Kendall, we've reached the end of another edition. Two programmes next week on Thursday and Saturday. Do join us. Goodbye.