← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
April 30, 2011
00:27:54
A very French murder story: Hugh Schofield tells how France has been transfixed by an...
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This is BBC Radio with a download
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of from our own correspondent.
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Here to introduce the program is Kate Ady.
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A mother, three sons and a daughter killed. Their father's gone missing. It's a very French murder story. The unrest in Syria, is it simply a case of peaceful protesters brutally suppressed? We're in Pakistan, where fear is stifling discussion about the country's controversial blasphemy laws. And in a classroom in India, where they're shock at the way Britain has treated Enid Blyton. France has been transfixed this month by an appalling human drama. The murder of a family shot dead in chillingly clinical fashion. Part of what makes the story so compelling is the prosperous, apparently happy provincial Catholic setting in which it took place. And as Hugh Scofield in Paris points out, there's also the fact that three weeks after the murders, the presumed killer, the Father Xavier Dupont de Ligonnais, is still at large.
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Murders happen all the time, but now and then there are murders that, by their extraordinary circumstances, by the eccentric character of their perpetrator, or by the social context in which they're set, somehow command our attention in a different way. Such is the case of the bizarre, terrible tale of Xavier Dupont de Ligonnais, France's most wanted man. As his name suggests, the deux is the clue. Xavier Dupont de Ligonnais comes from old French nobility. His ancestors lived in a southern province called the Rouergue, and they include a sister of the 19th century poet Lamartine. Xavier was born 50 years ago in Versailles and typically for the place, was given a strict Catholic upbringing. He married a young woman he met in Versailles called Agnes. Fast forward and now there are four children. Artieur, who's 20 and a student, Thomas, 18, a gifted musician, and Anne, 16, and Benoit, 13, both at school. They settle in Nantes, the city at the mouth of the river Loire, which in recent years has become a thriving economic hub with thousands of families moving there from Paris. Because of its agreeable provincial lifestyle, the Dupont de Ligonnais live in a smart townhouse. They have three cars. The younger children attend a Catholic school, and Benoit is a choir boy at the church. Agnes teaches catechism. Photographs show an attractive, happy family. There's a particularly poignant one of Xavier holding his daughter Anne. They're looking at the camera and she's giggling. This is a natural, properly functioning home where people love each other and things always work out in the end. Not a hint of the lurking psychological darkness. Last December, Xavier Dupont de Ligonnais began attending a shooting club outside Nantes. He'd inherited a rifle from his father who'd recently died. He told the club's owner and he wanted to learn how to use it. He came regularly, sometimes bringing along two of his sons. The owner said they seemed totally normal. He said he'd had lunch with the family one day and the parents laughed together and held hands. At the start of April, Xavier went to the club to practice four days in a row. He also bought a silencer. At around this time, he bought some other items too. Sacking, cleaning fluid, chalk, lime, a spade, a two wheeled trolley. On Sunday, April 3, he took the family out for a dinner in Nantes A again, all normal. But it was probably on the next night, Monday, that the plan was put into effect. With the point 22 rifle and the silencer, the family were shot dead one by one, probably as they slept. The two family Labradors were also shot. The bodies were buried under the terrace and Xavier Dupont de Ligonnais disappeared. France has been quite naturally riveted since the bodies were found two weeks ago. We've learned more about Xavier Dupont de Ligonnais, whose handsome, if bland features look out from every newsstand. It appeared he'd planned an abrupt departure, writing to the children's schools to say that the family were emigrating. His financial situation was catastrophic. He had various Internet related businesses and they were failing. He'd spent his wife's inheritance and had borrowed money from a lover in Paris who was now demanding it back. We also know that he'd had a complex relationship with his lately deceased father, who he hero worshipped and his faith was in crisis. He'd confided his doubts on a Roman Catholic Internet chat site and if you want, you can read his religious ramblings online. Above all, where is he? He was seen in southern France in the days after the killings, but since then, nothing. It's not just the horrific human element that makes it all so gripping. Somehow it seems a very French murder story. It's something to do with the provincial setting and with the times we live in. An upper middle class French family caught at a juncture between a prosperous, reassuring past and an uncertain, unsettling future. And a man who fails to find his way in this changing world. And twisted by some narcissistic gene, makes his own wife and children pay the price.
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Hugh Schofield in Paris. Human rights campaigners say more than 60 protesters were killed across Syria yesterday in another day of anti government demonstrations. More than half of them were said to have been shot by the security forces in and around the southern city of Dehra. Government sources, meanwhile, are reporting that a number of soldiers have been killed in attacks by what they call terrorist groups. The authorities in Damascus have prevented international journalists from entering the country. Owen Bennett Jones has sent us this dispatch from Beirut.
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Syria. The brutal suppression of peaceful protesters. That's what's happening, right? It's the line the UN Secretary General has taken, and the international media too. But having watched the Syrian crisis unfold over the last couple of weeks from Beirut, I'm not so sure that the brutal suppression of peaceful protesters quite captures it. I should say, first of all, that the BBC is covering Syria from Lebanon, Reuters is doing it from Jordan and the Associated Press from Cyprus. The Syrian government has thrown out virtually all the foreign correspondents based in Damascus and won't let any new ones in. It's also set about frightening local journalists, detaining them, calling them in for interviews and so on. In the old days, it might have worked. The official news agency SANA would have pumped out the government's version and having nothing else to work with, the international media would have reported it. Of course, the Syrian government couldn't control what Western journalists would have said, and no doubt they would have challenged the official line. But the government would have determined what the press was talking about. It would have defined the terms of the debate. But this time, something new has happened. Opposition activists have run an unexpected, brilliantly executed and brave campaign to film the repression and to put it online. Despite the government attempts to close down local communication networks, pictures showing dreadful violence by security personnel have been posted on the Internet, sometimes with more than one angle of the same incident. Now, this didn't happen spontaneously. The cameras, some of them disguised as pens so people could film without being noticed, had to be purchased and distributed. And the same goes for the means to upload the images. Satellite phones, foreign SIM cards and even, I'm told, small, portable sat dishes. And what story have the pictures told? Well, time and again, it's been the brutal suppression of peaceful protesters. And after Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain, it's been all too easy to accept that, without much pause for thought. But journalists are meant to be sceptical about whatever's put in front of them. And the BBC, and I'm sure it's not alone, has put considerable effort into checking the films to the extent that it can. Does the weather in the picture match what it was like on that day in that place? Does someone who's been to Darragh or wherever it is, recognise the buildings? If the cameraman speaks, is the accent right? And so on. I should say perhaps at this point that having seen countless of these films, many of them showing gross acts of violence, I have no doubt they're genuine and what's more, that the people who filmed them have taken great risks to tell the world what's been happening. But I do just wonder about what is not being filmed and what is not uploaded. The Syrian ambassador at the United nations this week said 51 security force personnel had been killed in the previous 10 days. The official Syrian news agency has named them and published pictures of their funerals. 57 dead. It compares with, according to the opposition, between 200 and 300 civilians killed over the same period. So far fewer but still a considerable number in the West. We have not heard much, if anything about those 57 dead security personnel. Of course, Sana doesn't help itself by writing up their stories in almost Soviet language. We feel proud of our son because the martyr's blood remains the epitome of sacrifice for the sake of the homeland, one father is quoted as saying. And a mother the homeland needs its brave sons who are ready to defend it. Clumsy and crude, but actually, how did those soldiers die? There was a man speaking on the BBC World Service the other night who made a fascinating remark. He said his wife's cousin, a colonel in the Syrian army, was shot dead with eight other soldiers on 10 April as they drove on the main road into Banyas. Their car was raked with gunfire. Now there's a lively debate about this particular incident on various blogs and I'll spare you the details, but to cut a long story short, the opposition claimed the soldiers were killed by the state for desertion, whereas the evidence strongly suggests they were ambushed and murdered in cold blood. The government's old fashioned effort to control the media coverage has been outflanked by a sassy opposition that has shaped what the PR experts would call the narrative. And even though they've been operating in the free market of cyberspace, they've been remarkably effective. But is it as simple as the brutal suppression of peaceful protests? Up to a point, Lord Copper Owen
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Bennett Jones Few issues in Pakistan are more sensitive than efforts to reform the country's strict blasphemy laws. Some of those who oppose any change are ready to use violence. In recent months, two leading pro reform politicians have been murdered. The controversial laws recommend death or imprisonment for life for anyone who blasphemes against the Prophet Muhammad. But critics of the legislation say it's open to abuse and that it's been used to persecute non Muslims and as Jill McGivering has been finding out, the debate surrounding any possible reform of the laws is now being stifled by fear.
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It takes days to track her down. People in the neighbourhood whisper that she's moved away. Call after call finally leads to a village where her son lives, and eventually I drive out there after dark in the hope of seeing her in a third party's home. As I enter the living room, the villager rushes forward to lower the blinds. Someone might pass and look in, he says. They mustn't know you're here. I wait. Finally the door opens and her son leads her inside. She is a slight woman, dressed from head to toe in a light green sour kame. Her limbs seem thin and fragile, her eyes frightened. She is only 62, but already she has the shrunken look of an elderly woman. It all started last August, she tells me. Her husband owns properties in Islamabad which he rents out. One of the tenants started to defraud him, collecting the rent money and keeping it himself. Her husband went to the police and registered a case against him. Then, she says, everything changed. The man they'd accused of fraud filed a charge of blasphemy against her husband, saying he'd insulted the Prophet. For the last six months her husband has been in prison, awaiting trial, facing a charge which carries the death penalty. She starts to cry as she talks. He's worked hard all his life, she says. Now he's losing everything. He had a stroke recently and can barely walk, and his mind isn't clear. She insists the blasphemy charges are fabricated, but she's in hiding because a charge of blasphemy raises such anger that she fears for her safety. In a bustling district of Rulpindi, close to Islamabad, I meet the mullah, who is one of those accusing him of blasphemy. He is an expressionless, self contained man with a black beard and round white cap. He produces a sheaf of papers as evidence, copies of letters written in childlike, misspelled English and in Urdu, allegedly by the accused. They're rambling, full of paranoia and wild claims. Soon I'll be king of Pakistan, says one in several. The writer describes himself as the last true Prophet and a serious blasphemy against Prophet Muhammad. I ask if the man who wrote these letters could perhaps be mentally ill. The mullah dismisses this. The man behaved normally, he says. How can he be mad? He gives me a hard look. We had two options, he says. The first was to prosecute him. The second, as Muslims, was to take matters into our own hands and kill him. It's hard for me to know what really happened. Did the accused man write these blasphemous letters or are they fake? Is the case motivated by reverence or a grubby attempt to seize an old man's assets? That's for the courts to decide and it could take years. In the meantime, an old lady is in hiding and her sick husband is in jail. Even if he were acquitted, he'd live in the shadow of death threats. This was the first of a series of cases I documented as I travelled through Pakistan. Many of the allegations involve religious minorities. In the eastern city of Lahore, I met a young Christian woman whose husband was accused of blasphemy. She looked haunted, her shoulders hunched and headscarf pulled so low it half hid her face. Her husband got into an argument, she told me, and when it got heated, she was jostled and assaulted. They went to the police to complain. The Muslims involved in the argument went along too, and accused her husband of insulting the Prophet. He denies it. The court has since convicted him and sentenced him to death. There were other stories too, whispered to me by people who have been accused and are now living in hiding. They seemed cowed and desperate and made elaborate arrangements to meet me in secret. It's impossible for me to know where the truth lies, but what struck me with force is the climate of terror surrounding these laws. Some critics of the laws say many of the cases involve false allegations. One described it as the easiest way in Pakistan of ruining someone's life. But any debate about the laws and whether they need to be amended has been stifled by fear. Two well known politicians, the the Governor of Punjab, Salman Tasiyeh, and the Minister for Minorities, Shahbaz Bhati, spoke out about the laws. They were both murdered earlier this year. This is a country of strong religious feeling. Any suggestion that someone's insulted the Prophet or defiled the Koran ignites violent public passion. I've been reporting from Pakistan for more than a decade. I've never before found it so difficult to persuade people to talk to me. Time after time, interviews were refused or cancelled. At the last minute, several people expressed concern for me and the other members of the BBC team, anxious that we would become targets ourselves. Perhaps that's what worries me most. The atmosphere of frightened silence and the knowledge that people who did speak to me knew that just by talking to me, they were risking their lives.
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Jill McGivering, back now from Pakistan, the world's coldest, driest and windiest continent, has long been a favourite location for scientists going about their business. You can sometimes find 4,000 of them working in Antarctica at any one time. Richard Wilson has been a frequent visitor, talking to the boffins who measure and monitor the ice sheets and note the advance and retreat of giant glaciers. But he says that on his latest visit, he was shocked to see how the place is changing. And it's doing so at a speed that's taken him and that scientific community by surprise.
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It is one of life's happy accidents that I have become a regular visitor to Antarctica. I've been there six times in 15 years, but my decade and a half timescale is but a tiny blip in the context of Antarctic history. Back in the 90s, I thought of it as a pristine wilderness called isolated on the edge of our planet. And yet the place is changing at a speed that allows even a layman like me to see what's happening. Antarctica might be hard to visit, but it's not frozen in time. Take, for example, the disappearing ice shelves. These are the places where Antarctic ice, hundreds of meters thick, spills many miles out onto the ocean. In recent years, nine ice shells have disappeared. The biggest measured almost 1,500 square miles, and it shattered and vanished in just a few short days. All of them were destroyed by rising air temperatures. When I first came here in the 90s, it was generally assumed that the vast ice sheets of west and East Antarctica were so big and cold that the air alone could not warm enough to melt them, an event that would cause catastrophic rises in global sea levels. That assumption was correct. The warmer air has had little impact. What nobody expected was that rising air temperatures would influence the winds and storms that batter Antarctica, and that these would in turn, affect the ebb and flow of its oceans. The currents that circulate polar waters have moved inshore, bringing warmer water into contact with the West Antarctic ice sheet. This has taken scientists by surprise, and a drama is now unfolding around the Pine Island Glacier, which has the unflattering acronym pig, is misleadingly named after a ship and is not an island at all, nor is it most people's idea of a glacier. In reality, it is one of the handful of giant rivers of ice that drain the huge West Antarctic ice sheet. Parts of it, especially near the sea, are now flowing at two and a half miles a year. That's twice as fast as 30 years ago. Yet despite this rush to the sea, the warm seawater is melting the leading edge even faster than the glacier is advancing. In effect, PIG is going backwards Water conducts heat more efficiently than air, making it a much more destructive force. But the most worrying loss can't be seen from above. Most glaciers flow from mountains downhill to the sea, but PIG and the West Antarctic Ice sheet don't do that. The bottom of their ice is mostly below sea level and by as much as 3,000 metres at the centre. All that was stopping the warmer water getting in under the ice was an underwater ridge that acted like a dam holding the sea back. The glacier has now retreated behind the top of the ridge and the sea has broken through, so there's little to stop it flowing downhill, perhaps all the way to the center, melting the ice from below as it goes. The scale of what is happening is unprecedented in modern human experience. Back in the 90s, we journalists had a tongue in cheek measure for assessing the newsworthiness of a lost ice shelf. Was it, we would ask, bigger or smaller than the English county of Norfolk? This flippant unit of area was the British Standard Norfolk, and these days it's redundant. PIG is four times the size of Switzerland and it's seen as the soft underbelly of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is the same size as India. Some scientists fear that the whole West Antarctic ice sheet could now become unstable. And we know it contains enough water to raise global sea levels by more than five metres. To have said this in the 90s would have been scaremongering. Now it's plausible. It's important to say that while nobody is sure exactly what will happen next, there's considerable urgency in the hunt for answers. So far, I haven't mentioned man made global warming. And in a way, it doesn't really matter. Whether you think all the melting in Antarctica is man made or some unexplained natural phenomenon, the fact is, significant parts of it are melting. And yes, nature has given the Earth higher seas in the far distant past. But there has never been a threat of rising sea levels on this scale when so many billion people lived on such a crowded planet.
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Richard Wilson. India's come a long way in asserting its own identity in the 60 years since independence. But discussion, sometimes it's heated, continues about the legacy Britain left behind when it departed in 1947. The old colonial power is sometimes credited with providing an enduring legal and parliamentary system. The games of snooker and cricket usually work their way into the debate. There's talk of railways, bureaucracy, of education, and most frequently of all, the English language itself. Gareth Armstrong has been talking to students about all this in the prosperous and ancient town of Pune in India's, northwestern Maharashtra state.
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I'm spending my days at the Pune Club. It's all dark wood interiors and marble floors with a veranda overlooking an immaculate cricket pitch and a pavilion with a white wooden fence. It was founded in 1880 by, among others, the Aga Khan and several Maharajas in In those days Poona, as it was called, was an important British military base and after independence it became the same for India's own army. As a boy I remember thinking what a funny sounding place it was when Major Bludnock huffed on about it on the goons. Spike Milligan, it turns out, was born here. It had a reputation as a sleepy, rather dull town favoured by retirees. But the Pune Club always was and still is an exclusive place, even with astronomical joining fees. Membership is now closed. The other India is not far away. I'm not talking about the slums and the squalor, though of course they're not hard to find. I'm talking about the new shopping malls springing up all over Pune with their designer stores, Marks and Spencer Body shop and American fast food outlets strolling in air conditioned comfort. It's odd being treated in shops with the same indifference I encounter on Oxford street in Lond. No hassling, no haggling, the prices are high, no charm. Although it's a relief to find good espresso instead of watery instant coffee around every corner. It's sobering to feel I could be anywhere in the West. A more disquieting similarity is the security that every mall, hotel and public building has learnt to live with. Just two years ago a terrorist bomb destroyed the German Bakery Cafe. This was a famous haunt of expats, travellers and locals. The explosion killed nine people and wounded 45. One of those who died was the waiter who picked up the abandoned rucksack in an attempt to find its owner. The bakery is being restored, but the legacy of searching under cars, body scanning and emptying briefcases and shopping bags remains at least. Back at the Pune Club the security check is less intrusive, but in fact when I walk through the detector arch and the alarm goes off, nobody takes any notice. Prakyat, the guard gives me a broad smile. Good afternoon sir, and even a salute. It's late in the day now and plump sari clad ladies are playing bridge while their husbands catch up with the times of India and cast a critical eye over the cricket match in the gentler heat. I'm here working with young people who recognise that India has a trump card in in the East's battle for economic Supremacy English. These middle class students are keen to sharpen their command of the world's lingua franca through speech and drama exercises and of course, communication skills. I hear a recitation of Wordsworth's daffodils, a surprising number of Kipling's stories, and from a teenage boy standing tall in his blue and white uniform, a rousing rendition of if Kipling's best loved poem. The students are baffled when I tell them that Kipling has been out of favour in Britain because of his high imperial sentiments. British rule to these youngsters is as far away as the Mughal invasion of the 16th century. Ancient history Deeptesh, who were delivered if with such aplomb, protests that the poem is so full of wisdom and the just so stories are Indian tales that happen to be written in English. Do you think Mowgli could have had those adventures anywhere else? He asks me in what we identify together as a rhetorical question. Another favourite author that surprises me is Enid Blyton. Back in the 1950s, my sister loved her tales of Malory Towers, the Cornish girls boarding school with a brave heroine, her prank playing classmates and their strict but fair teachers. But what could possibly be the appeal today here in Pune? I suppose these chaste, disciplined and protected girls here in India can identify with that era a lot more than their worldly young contemporaries back home. The puzzlement at Kipling's falling from grace is replaced by outrage when I tell them that British libraries stopped stocking Enid Blyton's books because of what are regarded as her literary shortcomings. When we turn from literature to communication skills, the apparent culture gap closes up and the jargon of commerce and the well judged pitch replaces the world of Mowgli and midnight feasts. In the dorm, flip charts and laptop displays are employed to appeal to imaginary NGOs and conservation groups. Fictional meetings and committees are addressed in well rehearsed and very earnest speeches. These are young people with open minds, good manners and a passionate belief in education. And as witnessed by all the students I talk to, a determination to speak good and useful English. I have to jettison my nostalgia for an India that was there only a decade ago. And like India itself, I have to get real.
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And with that from Gareth Armstrong, musing on the passing of history at the Pune Club, we've reached the end of another edition. I'll be here next Saturday with more from our own correspondence. Do join us. Goodbye.