← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Aug 02 2014
00:27:50
Despatches by reporters around the world. In this edition, Chris Morris, who was in to...
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Kate Adie
Hello from the. From our own correspondence studios at Broadcasting
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Programme Announcer
House in London, you've downloaded the latest edition of the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
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Kate Adie
It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Programme Presenter
Hello. Today, the Cypriots waiting for a knock on the door 40 years after their loved ones went missing. Growing alarm in West Africa as the Ebola virus spreads to a fourth country. We find out why newlyweds prefer the old to the new in one of China's fastest developing cities. And it's an invasion, brutal and sometimes messy. Our man gets a bird's eye view from a palace rooftop in Rome. But first, medical officials in Gaza say more than 100 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli missile strikes since the collapse of a temporary ceasefire yesterday. Many of the deaths have been in and around Rafah in southern Gaza, where two Israeli soldiers were killed and the third was said by Israel to have been captured during a Hamas ambush. The Palestinian group says it has no information on the whereabouts the missing 23 year old soldier and that he may have been killed in the fighting. The Health Ministry in Gaza says more than 1600 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed in the Israeli offensive. There have been more than 60 Israeli casualties. Chris Morris has sent this dispatch.
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Kate Adie
Just before I left Gaza, I had a brief moment of calm, sitting overlooking the seafront in Gaza City, where a couple of small boats were dragged up on the beach and two young boys were playing with a piece of driftwood. Then came the boom of artillery, quickly followed by another, the first some distance away, the second considerably closer. It dragged me back to the reality in which nearly 2 million Palestinians have been living for weeks. This was the same stretch of beach on which four boys from the Baqa family were playing football two weeks ago, but before they were blown to pieces by an incoming shell. And explosions happen all over Gaza. It often feels like nowhere is safe. As we were leaving our office in the city center this week, a huge blast hit the top of the residential tower block next door. Debris started flying. People were running and kids were screaming. I ducked down next to a man who'd been about to pray. And then families started streaming out of the building that had been hit. Would there be another strike? No one knew for sure. Some of the children were hysterical. Make it stop, Mama, make it stop. Screamed one little girl, her fingers pressed hard into her ears and her eyes. It was one of those vignettes that will stay with me. And there are plenty more. A man brought into Shifa Hospital in the boot of a car with his insides hanging out. The extraordinary level of destruction in Neighborhoods such as Shejair and Beit Khanun. They will take years to rebuild. And the pale, innocent face of 5 year old Sameh Junaid, his body wrapped in a shroud, killed by a bullet that grazed his heart as he sat on his uncle's lap. The day before I went into Gaza last month, I sat in Jerusalem wondering when it was that I'd first been to that narrow strip of Palestinian land by the Mediterranean Sea. I knew the occasion. It was 1994, the first ever visit by an American Secretary of State to Gaza City. Warren Christopher met by a smiling Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, at his seafront headquarters not long after the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. It had been a brief moment of hope, a turning point, said the optimists. Maybe crushing unemployment and a sense of being trapped in your own land could be about to end. Gaza has arrived at the red line of starvation, Mr. Arafat told his distinguished guest back then, and that has to be changed. I checked online for copies of newspaper articles. It was July 22, 20 years to the day, that made me feel a little old. And now I've left Gaza again. It makes me feel immensely sad because things have got worse, much worse. Could anyone have imagined that 20 years on, this would be their fate? Bombed from land, sea and air, stuck inside the world's largest prison with nowhere to run. Even if a permanent ceasefire takes hold, the humanitarian task in Gaza is enormous. A few days ago, with shells falling nearby, I watched as flames leapt 50 meters into the sky after an Israeli strike on the fuel storage facility of Gaza's only power plant. Hospitals and schools housing hundreds of thousands of people forcibly displaced from their homes will soon run out of fuel to run their generators. Most of Gaza is already without electricity for most of the day. The UN says things have reached breaking point. If the Israeli army succeeds in destroying the huge network of tunnels that Hamas has built deep underground to infiltrate fighters from Gaza into Israel, it will say one of its main objectives has been achieved. But what of the longer term? Hamas political popularity was falling before this conflict began, as Gazans grew tired of promises unkept that their daily lives would improve. That's why Hamas main demand is now in tune with public opinion. Lift the siege of Gaza. Open the borders. Give people a chance to live. At the UN school in Jabalia, hit by shellfire in the early hours of Wednesday morning, a young woman came up to tell me in perfect angry English that the world should be ashamed. As we were talking, a small boy came up and tugged at her clothing. I asked how he was. I just want to be somewhere better, he said.
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Programme Presenter
And that was Chris Morris. 40 years ago today, it was another Middle Eastern struggle making the headlines. Heavy fighting was going on in the wake of a second Turkish invasion of Cypr. Hundreds of thousands were uprooted from their homes in the conflicts between the island's Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities. There were massacres, torture, rape and looting. Eventually the island was partitioned and the so called green line still divides it today. Claudia Hammond has been looking at the fate of some 1500 people who went missing during the violence. Some are believed to lie in mass graves which are only now being examined by forensic experts.
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Maria Jordiadis
Maria Jordiadis shows me into her bungalow in the Greek Cypriot part of Nicosia, a city divided into two. As we go inside, I admire the bougainvillea and the orange trees filling the veranda. But what she really wants to show me are photographs set under glass on her kitchen table. There must be at least a hundred, and every single one is of a relation. There's my great granddaughter Christia, my son in law, my nephew, my great nephew, my son Michael, my son Andreas. Here's Emily. Here's my daughter Christy. She shows me the picture from the time her great granddaughter, wanting to be a hairdresser, had cut her own curly hair as well as her sister's. She shows me babies and how those babies now have babies of their own. Maria is 69 and has so many descendants that I have to admit I can't quite keep up with who's who. But as she shows us through to the living room and her husband brings in a tray of fresh lemonade made with lemons from her own trees, there's another set of photos, this time in frames displayed on the dark sideboard. The people in these photos are relatives of Maria's too, but they are all missing and have been for 40 years. Her mother, her father, her sister and her brother. All of my family is missing except me. Maria says she was saved by the fact that she'd recently married and left home. All she knows of what happened to them is that her parents and sister were killed together in their own house and. And the last they heard from her brother was a message he sent from 40 miles away telling his wife that he was OK. Maria tells me that for a while she and her brother's wife would go to meet the buses coming in from the north with soldiers who'd just been released. But he was never there. For a long time she imagined that One day there'd be a knock at the door and that when she opened it, her whole family would be standing there. But now she knows that won't happen. After 40 years, you accept it. There is no return, she says. What Maria finds harder to accept is that all she has of them are these few photos. The rest were destroyed in her parents home, along with everything else, including her wedding presents. What Maria longs for is to find their remains. It's not the bones themselves, but something is missing. It's to be able to put them in a place where you can go and leave flowers, light a candle and say a prayer, she says. Until then, I can't rest. It's like a physical pain. She clutches her chest and it won't go away. The worry has made her ill. She says she developed physical problems from crying so much and still takes antidepressants to help her cope. Her daughter tries to reassure her, saying perhaps they've not been found because they don't want to be found and that they want to stay where they are together. But Maria's hope now is that as more mass graves are discovered, there's a chance. Five times she's been and watched digging near her parents home. Every time the excavator went down, I was trembling, but there was nothing. In other parts of the island, families of the Turkish Cypriot missing are doing just the same. I meet a group of young people, mainly women, who are working in the heat, gently dusting away at the earth to reveal remains at the latest mass grave, right next to a big gravel extraction site. Then others who are carefully arranging the skeletons and taking tiny pieces of bone for DNA analysis. But it's slow work and the backlog is long. I'm shown into a room containing dozens and dozens of brown paper sacks, each containing the remains of one person. It can take years for the moment to come that Maria longs for, when the relatives are taken to a viewing room to see the remains laid out on a clean white table, sometimes a whole skeleton, wearing a tie even, or with their shoes, sometimes just a few bones. Some relatives stroke them, others hug them before arranging for a proper burial. On both sides, some people are now prepared to say where the bodies are buried. In the meantime, Maria is waiting. She thinks back to the last time they were all together, on the 15th of August 1974. It was a hot day and for lunch they made meat and potato stew, gathering salad from the fields to go with it. Her mother told her she'd just been to communion and couldn't be happier because her whole family was there around her, maria tells me. I thought maybe she had a sense of what was going to happen. Or maybe God loved her so much that he sent us all to be with her for that last day. She is determined that one day they'll be together again. I've told my children if they're not found until after I die, then please put their remains with mine.
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Programme Presenter
Claudia Hammond in Cyprus Now Is the Chinese economy the world's second largest, set for a tumble well? Not according to a report this week from the International Monetary fund. It forecasts 7.5% growth this year and similar figures for 2015. Clues as to how the country plans to further develop its economy are now emerging ahead of a key Communist Party conflict in Beijing in October. State television's talking of improving investment opportunities for all, while President Jinping's warning that challenges lie ahead. But as China continues its headlong dash into the future, there is at least one place where time seems to be standing still. Petroch. Trelawney has been to find it. In the southern city of Guangzhou, on
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Programme Announcer
the veranda of the red brick Canton Club, a young couple pose for their wedding pictures. The train of her dress spills down the steps of the early 20th century building. It's a humid day, well into the 30s, but her carefully applied make up is thick enough to prevent even a drop of perspiration shining through. Her husband to be in his shiny tight grey suit looks less comfortable. As the photographer kneeling below shouts a steady stream of instructions, I smile, hoping to convey a sense of encouragement and continue on my morning walk. Another couple stand in front of their photographer in the doorway of the next building. Its date and its purpose are hewn into the Stone bank of Taiwan, 1913. It's the same story outside the Banque d' alando chin, built 1899 and indeed in front of the grand pillars of the Citibank of the United States. The groom is in regulation shiny grey, but this time the bride is wearing a baby blue gown and clutching an enormous bunch of pink silk flowers. Guangzhou is one of the fastest developing cities in China. It's the capital of the southern Guangdong Province, where the Pearl river flows into the sea. The city fathers are ambitious. This is a rich part of the country, with a strong manufacturing base and rapidly increasing reputation for high tech research and development. Guangzhou's leaders believe their home should be considered an equivalent to Beijing and Shanghai. An area that was still farmland when I first visited here more than 20 years ago is now a spectacular high rise newtown with an opera house, a striking library and an elegant lattice clad TV tower shooting up into the sky above the Pearl River. Yet it's to the strange colonial hangover that is Shamian island that Guanzhou's brides and grooms flock for their marital photographs as well as the banks. The great old Hong Kong and Shanghai trading houses have left their mark here. Buildings which accommodated Butterfield and Swire, Jardine's, Dodwell and Company. Charmian was a sort of mini colony, a European free trade zone established in the 1860s. After the Second Opium War, a series of small islands and mudflats were turned into an enclave just over half a mile long at about 1,000ft wide. The British, who controlled 3/5 of the territory, established a presence, first followed later by the French who owned the remaining space. After the concessions were relinquished in the 1940s, the strange tale of Charmian was largely forgotten until the 1990s, when plaques started to appear, detailing in English and Chinese the history of each building. Gradually, restoration projects got underway. The veranda and trading hall of one former concern is now a particularly elegant branch of America's leading coffee vendor, complete with thwacking fans and wicker chairs. The old dairy farm building where cows were kept to provide Europeans with their daily milk, is now a smart nightclub. In the churchyard of Our lady of Lourdes, a row of vines flourish, the grapes beginning to get fat. With wide open boulevards and restored civic gardens, this is one of the cleanest parts of the city. Car access is controlled by the fact that there's only one bridge for vehicles. Most people get around by foot or cycle. Even a trio of policemen are on their bikes, blue and red lights flashing. That this is unlike the rest of Guangzhou is made clear when I am able to hear the sound of a distant harmonica. A corner or two later, I find its source. An old man playing as he sits on one of the benches in the former French garden. Yet the modern city is very close. Wandering down one street, I reach the canal that separates island and mainland. Little more than a few meters of murky brown water, overshadowed by the multiple layers of road bridges above. In Shanghai, in the former German enclave of Qingdao, and here in Charmian, China seems to have become more relaxed about the legacy of European occupation. Ironically, over the border in Hong Kong, there's no equivalently dense area of colonial heritage. Some old buildings survive, but most were lost during the great spurt of construction in the 1970s. I remember little in the way of street lighting on Charmian two decades ago. Few business opportunities had been seized. The place seemed to be considered something of an embarrassment, rather than being a strange and quirky part of China's rich history. Today, though, for the brides of Guangzhou and their sometimes bashful grooms, it seems its red brick granite, its balconies and verandas provide a more reassuring photo backdrop than the skyscrapers, dynamism and energy of the new city.
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Programme Presenter
Petrarch, Trelawney. In China, concerns growing about the Ebola virus, which has now spread into four West African countries and has, it's believed, killed some 730 people. Liberia's president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, has declared a state of emergency, saying the outbreak is catastrophic. There's also a state of emergency in Sierra Leone, where most of the deaths have occurred. House to house searches have been ordered to find people who've come into contact with the sick. But Tim Mansell, who spent the last three months there, says the authorities face real challenges in their bid to contain the virus.
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Tim Mansell
The posters are crudely drawn and graphic. There's one pasted to the wall of the squat concrete community centre in Crewe Bay, a fetid slum in the centre of Freetown, in the kind of place where you can imagine disease spreading fast. The houses are built of breeze block and have battered, rusting roofs. The spaces between them are piled with garbage. Small children with no shoes on tote yellow plastic jerry cans of water through the narrow lanes. A pig lolls in the mud while her offspring snuffle in the filth. Many Sierra Leoneans can't read, so public information is often presented on large posters. If I tell you that one of the symptoms of Ebola is bloody diarrhea, I think you'll, as it were, get the picture without me having to say more. People in Freetown are nervous. They're desperate to keep the virus at bay, to keep it out. In the provinces, they keep track of the numbers in the way they keep track of football scores. I've been making radio programmes there, and a couple of weeks ago we recorded one in Port Loco, a province north of Freetown. Ah, Port Loco, said somebody when I got back. Four cases. I would know immediately if my colleagues were talking about Ebola. It was in the tone of voice, the roll of the eyes, the uneasy laughter. Then they would tell me that so and so had died, and I would feel that rush of adrenaline that's triggered by sudden fear. One of my colleagues spent the whole day last week wearing a pair of long blue rubber gloves. People are frightened for two reasons. First, and most importantly, because there's no vaccine no known cure. Second, because of the ghastly physical reality of the disease as portrayed in those lurid posters. Yet these are people inured to disease. Consider, for example, their attitude to malaria, which kills thousands in Sierra Leone every year. Not infrequently in the last few weeks, I've encountered people complaining of a headache or a night of intense sweating. They slide off to the hospital and reappear a day or two later with a bag full of drugs. They laugh it off. Oh, yeah, there are so many mosquitoes at this time of year, they say, but you sleep under a net, right? Well, actually, no, they don't. Even though sleeping under a treated net is the single most effective way to avoid being bitten by a mosquito, being infected with malaria. Malaria they see as an occupational hazard, Ebola as a death sentence. I spent an instructive couple of hours with a woman from Finland. Her name's Eva and she was once a midwife, but she's just finished a five week stint with a Red Cross team that's been going door to door in Kailaon Province, the border region where Ebola first arrived in Sierra Leone. She was on what's known as a sensitization mission, explaining to people exactly how the virus spreads, how to avoid it. There are three simple rules, she told me. Rule one, if you've got a headache or a fever, go to the health centre for a test. You can recover from Ebola if the infection is spotted early enough. Rule two, if someone dies, don't touch the body. It's highly infectious. Don't wipe the mouth, don't close the eyes. Rule three, don't eat bush meat, the meat of wild animals. The underlying message was Ebola is manageable. It's deadly and frightening, but if you follow the three rules and use a lot of soap and water, you probably won't get sick. And if you do, even though the death rate is high, there are survivors. I told Eva she was a brave woman, but she shrugged the compliment off. She said she'd had the opportunity to take two different jobs, one in Sierra Leone, the other in South Sudan, where there's continuing fighting. I told myself, I'm not going to South Sudan, she said. I've got a family. As I left Freetown, there was a last reminder of the Ebola spectre. Outside the airport building was a table and a couple of buckets. We all had to wash our hands in water that carried a strong whiff of chlorine. My friend in the blue rubber gloves had asked me jokingly if I might have Space for him in my suitcase. I sympathise with his powerlessness. I had a plane ticket. He can only sit and wait. I hope the message that Ebola is both manageable and survivable gets through.
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Programme Presenter
And that was Tim Mansell, back now from Sierra Leone. The Eternal City of Rome has often been the target of invaders, but only relatively recently has it had to deal with an invasion of seagulls. We're used to them in this country. Down at the coast, you eat fish and chips in the open air at your peril. And the gull's liking for an ice cream cone is well chronicled, with or without chocolate flake. But in Rome, it's the wasteful habits of modern throwaway society which have brought the birds to town. Our man there, Alan Johnston, doesn't seem to mind them. But many Romans, it seems, are less tolerant of these scavengers from the seaside.
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Alan Johnston
I was on a bus the other morning, drowsily heading for work. But through the window I spotted something that woke me up. A rather gruesome scene on the pavement. A big, powerful seagull was standing over a pigeon it had killed. Then the gull grabbed the carcass in its beak. He launched himself over the top of my bus, dropped into a piazza and started to tear the pigeon apart. I suppose I still expect gulls to do the sort of things they're supposed to like ride the wind on lonely shorelines or follow trawlers, live off scraps of fish, not devour pigeons on city streets. But in many places, these birds are giving up on the sea and moving to town. Rome's no exception. For thousands of years, it had no nesting seagulls. They only began coming in the 1980s, lured by bins and dumps groaning with food, chucked away by modern Romans. Now there are tens of thousands of gulls here, and this latest invasion of the Eternal City can be a bit barbaric. A while ago, Pope Francis was at his window, high above the masses in St. Peter's Square. Beside him, two children held two pure white doves of peace. They released them and the crowd cheered. But horrifyingly, one bird was almost immediately attacked in mid air by a seagull. He got the dove up against the wall of the Pope's palace, but he only had his prey by the tail. The pigeon got away, leaving the gull with just a beak full of feathers. Still, it was hard to imagine a more disturbing omen for peace. And things didn't get any better when a vicious looking crow savage the other Hapless dove. But Rome's gulls must surely love the autumn. That's when millions of starlings come and they swarm at dusk. It's one of nature's great air shows. The flocks make vast, dark, swirling smudges in the sky. Hundreds of thousands of birds moving almost as one, twisting and turning through the fading light. Then they roost in a screeching mass in the trees along the Tiber. In ancient Rome, the shapes the starlings made in the heavens were watched for signs, a way of knowing the mood of the gods. But these days, the swarms are hunted by the gulls. For them, it must be a sort of banqueting season. And the seagulls aren't only bothering the local wildlife. I was at a rooftop bar the other evening. A posh place, white tablecloths and the panorama of the city skyline. But the seagulls were making trouble. They'd perch on the edge of the balcony, almost within touching distance, and fix you with a hungry glare. They wanted your snacks. I watched a big gull make his move. As soon as a table was abandoned, he was on it, gulping down the leftovers on a plate. Next to us, another girl was threatening an assault on a table that was still occupied. A smartly dressed lady with blonde hair piled high on her head didn't like this. And a male companion was struggling to calm her down. But it wasn't so much a scene from Hitchcock's the Birds, more of a pantomime, really. A seagull chick was slithering around on the tile, demanding food from his mum, screeching and screeching and screeching. The restaurant's pianist was doing his best, tinkling away. But the place still sounded like Aberdeen when the trawlers come home. As soon as we stood up from our table, a gull was on it, pecking at the peanuts. A chubby waiter trotted over and wearily flapped a menu at the big Bird. Those lucky enough to have rooftop apartments must loathe the gulls to become their rowdy neighbours. In the nesting season, the birds can be aggressive if they think you're threatening their chicks. You can be subjected to much squawking and dive bombing assaults, or even be the target of a well aimed streak of seagull droppings that'll spoil your morning on your terrace. But as it happens, I don't live up at the top of a palazzo and I don't mind the gulls. In fact, I reckon these latest arrivals add something to the ancient city. I like to see flocks of them cooling off in the river. When I cross the Tiber on a summer evening, I like to watch them go drifting, wings outstretched, across the red rooftops, gliding gracefully between the domes of the churches in the setting sun. And they're here to stay. The seagulls have become Romans.
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Programme Presenter
And with Alan Johnston in Rome keeping a wary eye on the skies above, we've reached the end of another programme. I'm here again next Saturday with more correspondence from around the world. I hope you'll join us then. Goodbye.