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From Our Own Correspondent
Asparagus fever!
00:28:00
Bahrain: Rupert Wingfield Hayes examines why all sides in the bitter conflict there in...
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- [00:00]
Mary Harper
Hello.
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Steve Evans
This download from the BBC is the
- [00:02]
Paul Howard
latest edition of the Radio 4 programme from our own correspondent.
- [00:06]
Rupert Wingfield-Hayes
It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Narrator/Presenter
Today, why both sides in the bitter conflict in Bahrain believe tomorrow's Grand Prix can help their cause. The French elections and an obsession with the romantic mythology of a glorious past. Nothing to do and nowhere to go. A sense of hopelessness at a refugee camp in Kenya, home to half a million people. And there's joy and celebration as the Prince of German vegetables emerges once again from the soil. Police are out on the streets of Bahrain in huge numbers this morning ahead of tomorrow's Formula One race, which is going ahead amid controversy and civil unrest. Last night, youths threw petrol bombs at police, who responded with tear gas and stun grenades. The Crown Prince, Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, said the event would not be called off. It was building bridges between people from different religions. This morning, armoured vehicles are patrolling as practice continues at the desert race track. Rupert Wingfield Hayes has been looking at how the world of motor racing came to collide with her struggle for power in this Gulf kingdom.
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Rupert Wingfield-Hayes
Most Bahrainis are not anti Formula One. The argument isn't about the race, it's about what the race represents for this tiny island kingdom, for the Al Khalifa royal family that runs the island and has for the last 200 years. It's about showing the world that Bahrain is back in business, that the unpleasantness of the last year is over, and that, as they like to tell foreign journalists, it's time to move forward. And there are many Bahrainis who would agree. Business has been bad, visitors have been staying away, hotels are half empty. What better way than the big race to bring them back? The government's slogan plastered across the island this race weekend is one nation unified in celebration. If only it were remotely true. For the opposition, Formula One is something completely different. It's been feeling pretty let down recently. America and Britain have lost interest. Foreign newsrooms only care about Syria and Iran. They feel like they've been forgotten now for a few days. They've got a golden opportunity to remind the world that they have not gone away, that it's not business as usual and they're going to make the most of it. And that's why immigration officials have been turning away foreign reporters by the dozen from Bahrain International Airport this week. I was told to leave on Thursday after being allowed four days in the country. Not long, but enough to draw some conclusions. I've been told by regime supporters and not a few expatriates in Bahrain, that people like me are getting it completely wrong that the nightly violence is confined to a few villages where a handful of hotheads throw petrol bombs at the police who act with extraordinary restraint. Well, on three evenings this week, I was at three different demonstrations. Yes, there were young hot heads with petrol bombs, but the vast majority taking part were peaceful and they were not a handful. The smallest demonstration was by about a thousand people and the others were bigger. The protesters were overwhelmingly young and there were large numbers of women. Each time I walked through the crowd with my microphone asking the same questions. Why do you come here? What are you hoping to achieve? And time and again I got the same answers, usually in impeccable English. We want freedom, equality and the right to choose our own government. Others spoke of economic hardship. We want jobs and decent housing. At its root, the conflict here is about discrimination. Two thirds of Bahrainis are from the Shia Muslim community. They consider themselves the original people of Bahrain, but they're ruled over by a Sunni royal elite, a family that took control of the island 200 years ago. Some describe this as a sectarian conflict, but it's really about control of wealth and power. A tiny feudal elite controls most of the land and wealth of Bahrain and all of the most important posts in the government and bureaucracy. The young Al Khalifa's cruise the posh parts of Manamah in their Porsches and Ferraris. You can spot them by their two digit number plates. Anger and resentment has been brewing here for decades. But the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt brought it into the open. The other accusation made against foreign journalists like me is that we're ignoring the real reforms that are taking place. That the royal government is keeping its promises to bring torturers to account and to free political prisoners. But how do you square that with the case of Abdel Hadi Al Khawaja? The veteran human rights campaigner is in prison on the 73rd day of a hunger strike and close to death. The question for Bahrain's government is why is he still in prison? Why are the police torturers who beat him so badly they broke his jaw, not on trial themselves? And where is the evidence to justify his life prison sentence? When I put those questions to Bahrain's Justice Minister, Sheikh Khalid Al Khalifa, he was evasive. Al Khawaja was arrested last year at the height of the anti government protests. Bahrain's own government has accepted he was tortured and his trial in a military court was unfair. And yet it refuses to let him go. And he's not alone. The Al Khalifa royal family may have made the calculation that they can ride this out that they are too important an ally for America and Britain and that Saudi Arabia is firmly behind them. The return of Formula One shows that the world has moved on. But after more than a year, the nighttime protests have not abated. And where a year ago the young protesters were calling for a new Prime Minister, the chant now is down. Down with King Hamid. The Al Khalifa's must go.
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Narrator/Presenter
And that was Rupert Wingfield Hayes. The campaigning's finally over in the French elections, which looks set to be the closest in decades. Voting for the next president starts tomorrow. Nicolas Sarkozy is facing the fight of his political life to get re elected. The principal challenge comes from the Socialist Francois Hollande. Observers reckon nearly a quarter of voters have still to make up their minds. Chris Morris has been noting how all the main contenders have been turning to the past for inspiration.
- [06:29]
Chris Morris
The Socialist flags were billowing in the breeze and there was a chill wind blowing from the east. But for many in the crowd, it must have felt like a wind of change about to sweep down through Paris. They'd gathered in their tens of thousands at the Chateau de Vincennes, a medieval castle on the eastern outskirts of the city. While nothing can be taken for granted, their presidential candidate, the unassuming Francois Hollande, seems quietly confident that victory is in sight. We've waited a long time for this, said a man in the crowd, carrying a small boy on his shoulders. A very long time. It has been 30 years since a Socialist challenger won a French presidential election. But this is actually an election campaign which has dug far deeper into French history. There's been something of an obsession with the romantic mythology of a glorious French past. While Mr. Hollande's supporters showed their strength at Vincennes, the incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, laid claim to the center of the city with a huge rally in the Place de la Concorde. In his speech, the President launched an impassioned defence of eternal France, embodied, he said, by Moliere, Napoleon and Charles de Gaulle. It was a patriotic appeal designed to rouse the faithful. The right wing newspaper le Figaro described Mr. Sarkozy's performance as rich, lyrical and forward looking. The left wing Liberation called him nonsensical and inert. One thing is for he won't be giving up without a fight. The President didn't mention the fact that he was standing on the spot where Louis XVI was executed at the height of the French Revolution. But Mr. Hollande spotted a chance to score an historical point of his own. I'm not asking for anyone's head to be cut off he said, I'm simply asking for another one to be chosen. But the prize for the best use of history, repackaged as politics, goes without doubt to the left wing firebrand Jean Luc Melanchon, who's been the surprise wild card in this campaign. A month ago, he led a crowd of tens of thousands in a symbolic march on the Bastille, the former prison stormed so famously in 1789 when it was the hated symbol of the despotic Bourbon monarchy and the old regime. Some of Mr. Melanchon's modern day supporters wore the red liberty caps of the 18th century revolt as they heard their man call for a peaceful civic insurrection. Spirit of the Bastille, we're back, he told an enormous crowd, the people of French revolutions and rebellions. He won't win. But Mr. Melanchon has shaken up this presidential race with his impassioned rhetoric. And his references to the past are quite deliberate. The idea of France as a great power at the center of world events simply makes people feel good about themselves, whether on the left or the right. The French left see themselves as the inheritors of that great revolutionary spirit. And Mr. Melanchon's battle cries remind them of these ideological roots. And at the other end of the spectrum, the far right candidate, Marine Le Pen, also looks back towards a very different but equally idealized vision of France. More nationalist, less open, with far fewer immigrants. Like her father before her, she'd like to claim the mantle of the French patron saint, Joan of Arc, who kicked out the invaders. But the Maid of Orleans is also a national symbol greater than any single party. But why so much harking back towards the past? One of the main reasons is that the present is making everyone so anxious. The Eurozone crisis, and in particular the comparison of the French economy to Germany, has cast a pall of gloom over this election season. There are calls for change and for economic renewal and reform, but not much appetite for the tough choices which loom in the near future. Social Security, pensions. It's easier to look back to a golden age and summon a spirit of resistance. So the past is a comfort zone, the only place where all the main candidates can sketch out their vision of hope. But fast forward to the present, and this is, in the main, an election without a feel good factor. It's a source of concern for everyone, but usually it's bad news, in particular for an incumbent.
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Narrator/Presenter
That was Chris Morris in Paris. The Dadaab settlement in northern Kenya is the biggest refugee community in the world. Its population of more than half a million means as many people live there as in places like Leeds or Bristol. And Dadaab is getting bigger all the time as people flee the conflict and hunger in neighbouring Somalia. It's been there for 20 years now and is divided into four separate camps. Mary Harper has been finding out that recent attacks on the refugees and the kidnapping of foreign aid workers have led to the humanitarian agencies dramatically scaling down their work.
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Mary Harper
The first thing I noticed was the smell. It hung trapped over the camps, stale and miserable, a mixture of smoke and old clothes, of bodies in need of a good wash in a place where water, soap and privacy are scarce. 20 years worth of the dirt of humanity, in a place where people live in tents on the sand, unable to go home and forbidden from leaving the camps to try to build a life elsewhere. As one man said, we live in an open prison. The second thing that struck me was the way people moved and the expressions on their faces. There was a death of spirit. Their bodies appeared beaten down, shoulders hunched as they walked listlessly through the camps, dragging their feet through the red dust. A boy in pink flip flops, far too small, scuffed his way onwards as a white Land Cruiser raced past us, churning up a cloud of sand which beat against our faces. We stopped to talk to a young man who emerged from what was now his home, a flimsy construction of sticks and ragged clothes. Like everyone else, he'd built a low fence of thorns around it to separate himself from the families crammed about him. He said his name was Bashir Abdullahi Abdullah, and that he was 25 years old. I walked here with my mother from far inside Somalia. I hate this place, especially the hot, dirty wind from which I cannot escape. Worse still, there's nothing to do and nowhere to go. No wonder, I thought, that some young men leave this place, returning to Somalia to fight for Islamist insurgents linked to Al Qaeda. Although some people have lived in the camps for more than two decades, they're still not allowed to use stones, concrete or other robust materials to build their homes. Dadaab, the authorities say, is a refugee camp, not a permanent settlement. The strongest looking buildings I saw were the mosques made out of metal sheets, and the tin toilets standing like sentry boxes at regular intervals between the mass of cloth tents stained red with dust. Things cheered up a little in what my companions described as IFU High street, the main shopping area for one of the camps. Kiosks made entirely from empty, flattened tins of food donated by the usa, sold batteries, small bottles of perfume and mobile phones. There was a barber's shop an Internet cafe, a money transfer business. We drove past some freshly dug graves as we left the camps, heading up towards the Somali border. We reached a place where, in material terms, people have far less than those in the camps, even though they're native Kenyans, not refugees. They have no shops, no mobile phone coverage, no clinics and no free food and water rations. Until recently, they had to walk their livestock for three days and three nights from their grazing grounds to water. One of the people I was with, who originally came from the area and has done well for himself in the capital, Nairobi, understood how difficult things were. He raised enough money for a borehole which had just started working. We watched as cows, sheep and goats quenched their thirst. They no longer needed that long walk to water. We visited another settlement where the same man got together some wealthy friends and in a single day raised a hundred thousand dollars to pay for a school. Some lively boys scampered about and showed us where their school used to be. It was just a tree in the sand and they and their teacher used to sit in its shade. Now they had three strong new buildings for freshly painted in cheerful colours. The money had also been used to buy a vehicle which was rented out for $2,000 a month to an international aid agency in Dadaab. This was used to pay the teachers salaries to keep the school going. It was time to say goodbye and to head back to Dadaab. It was early evening and the refugees were venturing into the periphery of the camps to look for firewood. A man paced past a small axe swinging lethargically. By his side, a group of children played a half hearted game of football. I was struck by the contrast in energy levels between the refugees and the people we'd just visited outside the camps. One was a place where, with a bit of appropriate help from its own people, the community was doing things for itself with a sense of pride. The borehole and the school which had so obviously transformed their lives, had been built exactly where they were required, with no need for international development assistance, feasibility studies, expensive consultants and project managers. The other, the refugee camp and its atmosphere of resigned hopelessness remained hostage to the lumbering machinery of foreign aid.
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Narrator/Presenter
Mary Harper in Kenya, a new road's being blasted through a section of the Himalayas in northern India which promises to change lives there forever. When temperatures drop, you can only get from one valley to another by trekking along a frozen river. During some of the other months, deep snow means this part of Ladakh region is completely inaccessible. Visitors can't get in. The people who live There can't get out. Paul Howard's been to visit them and to see what they think of the prospect of this new link with the outside world.
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Paul Howard
The sights of the frozen river disappearing into the stygian gloom of the gorge ahead made me pause. Never walk on the ice. My mother's 35 year old warnings about the perils of frozen ponds rang loud in my ears. Noticing my hesitation, my friend Tanzin, who lives in London but whose home and family were the other side of this imposing obstacle and were the reason for our journey, chided me gently and demonstrated just how solid the ice was by skating nonchalantly. He was right. It was too late to back out now. We had travelled half way round the world to spend the next five days walking through the frozen Zanskar river gorge high in the Indian Himalayas. Any qualms I felt should have been resolved long ago. In this respect I was lucky. Those like Tanzin who who come from the remote Buddhist kingdom of Zanskar don't have the luxury of Choice. Trapped behind 6,000 meter high peaks, the high passes that provide summer access to Zanskar are blocked by snow for seven months of each year leaving Zanskar completely isolated. The only exception is in the early months of the year when the plummeting temperatures minus 30 degrees Celsius is not uncommon, allow the Zanskar river to freeze and the Pathos gorge to be negotiated. If you don't mind walking on the ice. Of course, it was time to take the plunge, though only metaphorically. I hoped. I stepped forward. The ice held. This ought not to have been a surprise. As well as safely supporting myself and Tanzin, the frozen Zanskar river has supported traders and pilgrims for nearly a thousand years. Once a tributary of the famous Silk Route, the Chadar, the name given to the journey through the Zanskar river gorge, is essential to life in Zanskar. Without it, permanent habitation would not have been possible. Yet the fate of the Chadar, even that of Zanskar itself, is now uncertain. Change began with the arrival in the 1980s of tourists looking for that elusive combination of adventure and a genuine cultural experience. On our way through the gorge, the majority of those we encountered were either trekkers or their guides, cooks and porters. There were no longer monks taking yak butter to sell in neighbouring Ladakh or returning with copper pans from the appropriately named village of Chilling at the head of the gorge. Far more significant however, was the road workers camp we passed on our arrival in Zanskar proper. And not just because the Indian army officer in charge was so drunk he could no longer recall where or even what the satellite phone was that we hoped to use to call for a jeep to collect us. The camp marked the current extent of the new road that is being blasted through the river gorge and that will, once finished, provide Zanskar with its first permanent connection with the outside world. Exactly how long it will take to complete is uncertain. Construction started more than 10 years ago and there is still a lot of hard work to be done. The exact impact of the changes it will bring is similarly unclear. What is clear is that Zanskar, for now at least, is still defined by its isolated past. The careful husbanding of scarce resources that has allowed people to live in such a hostile environment for millennia, the continued observance of cultural and religious traditions now prescribed in Chinese controlled Tibet that has prompted the Dalai Lama to say Zanskar is vital to the future of Tibetan Buddhism as a whole. What is also clear, I discovered while spending a week enjoying noodled stews and potent home brewed Chang with Tanzin's family, was the local desire for the road to be completed as soon as possible. The concerns I expressed about the loss of traditions like the Chada in an increasingly homogenized world cut little ice, if you'll excuse the pun, with those for whom a round trip to the shops or the hospital is such a perilous 10 day trek. The reasons for this enthusiasm were reinforced as we took to the ice again for our return journey. It was not the challenging chadar that upset the cheerful group of parents and school children. We met tackling the world's most arduous school run. Snow, ice and sub zero temperatures are facts of life for Zanskaris. It was the eight or 12 months away from home that resulted from Zanskar's continuing isolation that saw stoicism give way to sadness. My own concerns about the wisdom of choosing to walk on the ice of the Zanskar river now seemed considerably less important.
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Narrator/Presenter
Paul Howard in the Himalayas Here there are those who contend that with all food now available at all times of the year in your local supermarket, the joys of seasonal eating have been largely forgotten. But others, perhaps those who eagerly anticipated the first English asparagus of the season will say that's nonsense. There's as much pleasure as ever to be had from sampling what's freshest and ripest. In Germany, the short season for consuming white asparagus has just begun. And as Steve Evans has been finding out, that's a cause for celebration.
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Steve Evans
It is spargel sight in Germany, just in this part of the world, the season opened on Thursday with a formal tasting in the presence of dignitaries of the state of Brandenburg. This matters. Just as the sighting, or rather hearing, of the first cuckoo in spring was once a British ritual marked by a letter to the Times, so is the cutting of the first crowns of asparagus that peep out of dark mounds of earth in Germany. And now that the season is open, everybody in this country will be bombarded with the stuff. For the next two months there will be wooden huts at thousands of road junctions selling nothing but white asparagus. Every restaurant. Every restaurant offers its own specials of asparagus wrapped in bacon or in a buttery sauce, or just plain butter with pepper, or crisp on a plate, or limp on a plate. There is asparagus soup, asparagus sausage. I've had ham with asparagus embedded in it. Asparagus ice cream is not unknown and or so I am informed by our keen nosed friend, no toilet at a concert will now be free of the smell that asparagus imparts. It is a great leveller, she says, no matter how posh. The patron of the poshest symphony hall, the smell is the same. Not that it puts Germans off what they really do call the king of vegetables. There will be asparagus festivals. Spargel queens will be crowned with crowns made of asparagus. The most imaginative have the asparagus sticking out like horns. There will be debates about cooking, should one add sugar? And debates about peeling. Is an electric peeler a betrayal of tradition? Though the usual debate about the influx of Polish labourers to pick the very prince of German vegetables has been muted this season. Farmers have already been interviewed on television. An excuse, it seemed to me, for the coarser bits of the German media to get pretty female reporters to ask fat old farmers of the male variety whether asparagus really is an aphrodisiac.
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Chris Morris
Please.
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Steve Evans
But most aspects of the season are very wonderful. The joy is not the food itself, but but the idea of seasonality. The food comes, you eat lots of it, you get a bit tired of it. Oh, not asparagus again. And then it goes promptly on June 24, the Feast of John the Baptist, when the industry determines that enough is enough and the stalks of the old have to be hacked ready for the next season. This sense of everything in its time makes the food seem like a real part of the country in its raw, earthy, eternal texture, as indeed it is a product of the dark soil itself. Mushrooms, too, are celebrated in the same way as they come into and out of season. Who knows what the mixture of phallic symbolism and fertile soil means in the German psyche? All I know is that to eat asparagus and is to partake of the country itself. German cooking is not as cosmopolitan as that in Britain. Perhaps because Britain is a more mongrel country. We know that chicken tikka masala is the British national dish. Germans, incidentally, sometimes sneer at British cooking. I point out that it is actually the most varied cuisine in the world because it's so eclectic, but that cuts no ice. Or asparagus Spargelzeit is the most obvious sign of seasonality. But there are others which aren't celebrated. As you drink fruit juices, for example, or eat cakes, both highly advisable in Germany, you notice the ingredients changing. The country's unsung delicacy to my palate is rhubarb. And rhubarb comes around just about now and as a fruit juice and a cake topping, and lasts into the summer and then vanishes. And then black cherries, sweet and sour and juicy, arrive and are devoured and depart. Britain, I'm afraid, may be losing this sense of the seasons. It is surely marvellous to eat asparagus at any time of the year, flown in from Peru or Kenya. And in my family, tinned green asparagus remains a family treat at Christmas. But there is something pretty orgasmic, too, about waiting and anticipating and then enjoying. Who can forget the first bite of an English apple in the autumn, or a new Pembrokeshire potato in the spring? Or in Germany, a plate of white asparagus with. With butter and a lot of pepper in April, in fact, this very evening.
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Narrator/Presenter
Steve Evans in Berlin with that German stuff. I'll stick to the English asparagus, please. That's it. I'll be back with more from our own correspondence, more from their menus to probably next Saturday morning. Do join us. Goodbye.