← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Battle for Aleppo
00:28:28
Ian Pannell visits a school which has become a morgue for children in the Syrian city...
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- [00:00]
Ian Pannell
You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent.
- [00:04]
James Harkin
You can hear the version of the
- [00:06]
Ian Pannell
programme we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our site at BBConline. But here's the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
- [00:17]
Kate Adie
Today, the primary school in Syria, where the storeroom's a prison, one classroom's a clinic, another's a morgue. We're on the night train to Minsk, where the secret police are still the KGB and there's talk of torture. Just down the road from McDonald's, there's time for football and dancing after the melon harvest in Senegal and an urgent plea from summer camp in the United States. Mum, please send fudge. Reports from Syria's second city, Aleppo, this morning say the army is stepping up its bombardment of rebel held areas. It isn't yet the mother of all battles forecast yesterday by one newspaper, but the United nations has voiced alarm at the prospect of a major confrontation and the threat to civilians. The struggle for Aleppo, a city of two and a half million people, is being seen as a potential turning point in the 16 month uprising against President Bashar Al Assad. Columns of tanks are said to be moving towards the city and some districts have come under air attack. Our correspondent there, Ian Pannel, says already there have been casualties.
- [01:26]
Ian Pannell
She was the girl with no name. When we returned to the rebel base, she was laying on her back on the floor where she appeared to be sleeping. The teenager had a pale complexion and wore a pretty red dress, her lower body draped in a blanket. I noticed our translator was sat at her side. He was crying. I'd been wrong. The girl wasn't sleeping. She was dead. Killed in a government artillery strike. The blanket masking her wounds. Who is she? I asked. No one knew. She'd been found in the road near to where the shell had landed. A nameless victim of a war where it's the blameless who suffer the most. This was the scene in one of the classrooms of the local primary school, now a temporary rebel base. But when the war came to Aleppo, the children were kept at home, many fleeing with their families out of the city. And today the corridors are filled with the sounds of gunmen checking their weapons, the animated talks of attacks being planned, of shouting and crying and praying and dead bodies. A government tank captured by the rebels had been parked just outside the school gates on a patch of rough ground when a military helicopter attacked the area. The tank's massive anti aircraft gun was turned towards the sky, where it erupted with a FEROCIOUS ROAR what had been a playground was now a staging area for rebel vehicles, where men and munitions, food, medical supplies and prisoners are ferried in and out. A constant stream of detainees was brought to the base, men accused of being members of the Shabiha, a feared government militia that's been implicated in some of the massacres committed in this war. They were dragged in, hands tied behind their backs, many bearing the marks of having been beaten. Some cried as they were brought in, pleading with their captors that they were innocent. Others were more defiant. Most were held in a classroom. But standing next to a cupboard where pens and textbooks were once stored, I heard the sound of knocking. At first, I couldn't work out where it was coming from. Then it became clear it was inside the tiny metal cupboard where those prisoners deemed to be the highest threat were being held. Later, a group of them was bundled into a van. I asked one of the fighters where they were going. To see a judge, he replied, will they be killed? He looked at me. If the judge decides they've got blood on their hands, then yes, they'll be killed. This is a brutal conflict where the line between right and wrong has become blurred. Human rights abuses are being committed by both sides. The United nations estimates that more than 10,000 people have died in this conflict. Activists say it's far more than that. In the course of just a few hours at the school, we witnessed the number of dead rise. First, there was the deathly crash of an artillery shell smashing to the ground nearby, shaking the windows and sending everyone running for cover. The government says it only targets rebel fighters, men it calls terrorists. But what their artillery shells invariably hit are civilians. In this case, someone's house. The victims were rushed into the school and another classroom that's become a makeshift clinic. Pools of blood on the floor marked a terrible trail to where two young boys were being treated. In one bed, eight year old Mohammed wept and cried out for his father. Baba. Baba, he said. Shrapnel from the shell pockmarked his small body and he screamed as the fragments were gouged out. In the other bed lay his older brother. He was dead. It's a mark of how war brutalizes a society when a school is a morgue for children, classrooms, emergency clinics, store cupboards, prisons. In the space of a week, Aleppo has become the main battleground in this conflict. The city is the largest in the country and its economic capital. Neither side can afford to lose here, and as a government counterattack gathers pace, so more children will die. As Syria seems to pull itself apart,
- [05:44]
Kate Adie
and that's Ian Pannell in Aleppo reporting. The Arab Spring has meant new challenges for newsrooms. It's been an event not only covered by accredited journalists. Indeed, they've often found their access to countries in the midst of revolution blocked. But the man and woman in the street are now news gatherers, too, and the Internet means they can file their stories and pictures whenever they want. While editors here wonder whether or how best to include them, James Harkin's been talking to one amateur cameraman who's found himself in the frontline of a propaganda war.
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James Harkin
If there's one thing more dangerous than a Syrian gunman, it's a clever young man armed with a mobile phone. I first met Jamil late in the evening in a crowded coffee bar in Istanbul. He was one of a group of volunteers who helped the rebels with arms and supplies. He stood out. This thoughtful, impish 24 year old seemed a world away from an armed insurrection, as if he'd simply fallen in with the wrong crowd. At the end of a long conversation about military strategy and internal politics, we'd relaxed a little, and I asked him what he'd been up to before the revolution. Do you want to hear my story? He asked, as if introducing an afterthought. It's a good one, I think. Jamil was in his final year of an engineering degree at Damascus University when the Arab Spring arrived in Syria last March. It might even have been his background as an engineering geek which gave him the idea. For whatever reason, he started turning up at demonstrations with a mobile camera phone skillfully secreted under his T shirt and pointed at the outside world. Then he'd simply walk up and down, less of a demonstrator than a cluzo like passerby, picking up tidbits of footage which he could later put up on YouTube. His big break behind the camera came on the same day as his first appearance in front of it on Syrian state tv. Last spring, Jameel had been ambling around the fringes of a pro government demonstration in central Damascus outside a conference of the moderate opposition, where a female reporter was soliciting suitable voices for the evening news. She was asking loudly for English speakers, presumably to impress the international audience with his serviceable English. Jameel weighed straight in and switched his camera on. What should I say? He asked. Just that the opposition have every right to hold a conference. That Syria is a free country, but that you support the president. Ok, said Jamil. But instead, with both her camera and his concealed one rolling, he went spectacularly over the top Our president is the best president in the whole world, he said, satirizing the regime propaganda pervasive on official Syrian TV for the benefit of his Internet audience. Everyone knows that every Syrian loves the president. So what do we do with the opposition? I say kill them. Jamil's rhetoric quickened to a kind of tease. We are all Syrians here, so what do we want? I mean, what do all of us Syrians really want? The clump of pro government supporters crowded around him, both baffled and impressed. And Jamil said that he had to bite his lips not to shout freedom and then scarper. Instead, he left them with a damp squib. What we want is, er. I mean, we sort of want to fix it. I know this video well because two days later and hundreds of miles away, I met Jamil again, this time in the southern city of Antakya on Turkey's border with Syria. And he showed it to me personally. I had to admit it was brilliant. All the wit and creativity of a TV prankster like Sacha Baron Cohen, married to the urgency of a revolutionary intervention. It was also a little courageous. And as Jameel clicked through the other videos on his laptop, it got more courageous still. There was his footage of young men and women doing no more than singing the Syrian national anthem and then being hurled into the back of a van and beaten up for doing so. That one ended up in Al Jazeera and on France 24. Do you see my watching the clip? I was so scared I didn't wear it for weeks. The next one was scarier still. 2 pro government militiamen taking him aside at the edge of an anti government demo, frisking him and then asking to see his mobile phone. Jamil duly handed over the spare one he kept in his pocket, at which point the viewer sees the tattooed fingers of the paramilitary scroll through his phone, looking for videos. The sequence seems to last forever. Do you see my hand shaking? Said Jamila excitedly. I was scared stiff. In September, Jamil's luck finally ran out. At a protest, he and his girlfriend got separated from each other and she was arrested by the secret police. They spent three days questioning her on who her companion was and what he was up to, and eventually she had to tell them. Jamil promptly fled Syria for Turkey and his days as a revolutionary cameraman were over. Like many Syrians, his enthusiasm for using the media as a metaphorical weapon had hardened into a thirst for the real thing.
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Kate Adie
James Harkin. There can only be victory. The main thing is winning, not participating. That rather UN Olympian quote comes from the sports mad president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko. Belarussians hope to do quite well in the Games. They've particular hopes for their rower, Ekaterina Karsten and tennis player Victoria Azaria. But Mr. Lukashenka, himself keen on football, skiing and tennis, is not among the 40 presidents, prime ministers and members of royalty who've turned up to cheer on their athletes. Sanctions imposed on his country after a crackdown on his political opponents mean he's not allowed to travel within the European Union. But John Sweeney has travelled to Belarus and he says it was a bit like going back in time.
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John Sweeney
The night train east from Warsaw to Minsk. Clickety clack, clackety click. Eases to a dead stop somewhere, nowhere. Bursts of sodium yellow punch holes in the dark. METAL CREAKS A steel door slams. On these particular tracks, you can't escape history's clatter of metal on metal. This is the fuzzy, endlessly shifting borderland between Poland and Russia. These railway lines carried Stalin's men West in 39 and Hitler's east in 41. Then Stalin's lot back again in 44. Welcome to Belarus. Stalin's heir is still in charge here. I'm going in undercover and I'm scared. Two weird things happen once we enter Belarus. The first, the entire train jolts and ker CLUNKS and then is slowly lifted off its wheels by what feels like a giant hand and plonked on wider Russian train tracks to the accompaniment of an awful lot of heavy metal. CLUNK clunking. You can forget sleep. The second thing is you time travel backwards to Soviet time, when strong men ruled and dissidents got smudged out. A dawn of rare beauty. A great red sun rising above a green meadow swathed in pearl gray mist. Through the carriage windows, oceans of forest, mainly silver birch, saunter by. Then a duck pond. Little wooden houses with yellow peach grey window frames as fragile as if they are made from gingerbread. Half dead with lack of sleep, I feel as though I've stumbled into a fairy story. The paranoia that troubled me through the night seems unhinged. This seesawing between morbid fear of arrest and sniggering at my overhyped paranoia never goes away. The whole time I'm in Belarus, the train clickety clacks into Minsk. There are some agreed code words, something like the paprika will be hot tonight, but dog tired. I've forgotten what they are. My phone rings. It's Dick Tom can't find me. Harry's coming. I begin to get the feeling that if the Other side had half an idea of how rubbish Tom, Dick, Harry and I are, they'd laugh themselves silly. The other side, by the way, is the kgb. Imagine a post Stalinist regime so cocky it can't even be bothered to rebrand the name of the secret police. Hail President Alexander Lukashenko. In power for 18 years, winning election after election after election. The people who doubt that, who say that he steals votes, runs a death squad and kills his own people, end up in the Americanka, the American place. Named after a Chicago prison design from the 1920s. It's a rotunda prison with coffin shaped cells and they say that's where the KGB tortures. I asked one former guest of the Americanka for directions. Vlad Kubets, an opposition worker said it's on the main street in Minsk, Independence Avenue. You go past McDonald's on the left, TGI Fridays on your right, and just opposite the statue of dzerzhinski, there are four columns of the KGBHQ. Behind them, out of view, the americanka. In December 2010, elections were held and Lukashenko claimed four out of five votes. When the opposition cried foul and hit the streets, the riot squad cracked down. 725 people arrested, including seven presidential candidates. A young opposition worker was another guest of the Americanka when he was taken in. Snow lay on the ground, it was minus 20 and icicles hung from the open cell windows. He was forced to strip naked and stand motionless and silent against a wall while mass guards swishing electric cattle prods bark commands. First you shiver, he continued, then you hurt, because it really pains. It really hurts to stay in such a position. You might think that standing still is not torture. When I got home, the BBC carried out an experiment. I went to a freezer in North London and took my clothes off. The cold got to my fingers first, then my fiddly bits. As I stood spread eagled against the wall. Splinters of snow frost lay on the ground. My whole body began to ache. The opposition In Belarus endured 40 minutes of this. I lasted 40 seconds. It felt like hours. Do not doubt it. What happens in the Americanka is torture as cruel as the rack. I left Belarus by train and arrived in next door Lithuania. There on the main street is the KGB museum. You go down to the basement, see the stone floors, the windows that don't shut, the execution cell. The thing is, as one former inmate of the Americanka told me, the KGB in Belarus, they're still at it.
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Kate Adie
John Sweeney. And he'll have more on that subject in torture in the 21st century. That programme's here on Radio 4 on Monday morning. They've just had the melon harvest in Africa's westernmost country, Senegal. Melons in their millions have been plucked and packed for a hungry European market and foreign investors have been moving in. As the Senegalese seek to develop further their farming sector. They're moving away from traditional practices and, aided by a suitable climate as well as the essential fresh water supplies and abundant labour, are moving more and more into the production of fruit and veg for export. Susie Emmet was there one day recently when work in the melon fields finished early. There was a football match between permanent workers and casual staff and it seems there was as much to watch off the pitch as on it.
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Susie Emmett
THE whistle BLOWS, PLAYERS SHOUT the ball is kicked into play with a thwack. At least that's what I imagine I'd hear if it wasn't for what's kicked off. On the touchline, a tall man in a grey long sleeved dress with fabulous embroidered neckline is beating furiously on a small drum clamped in his armpit. He exhorts two seated drummers to do the same and together they beat out a deep, quickening rhythm. Three iridescently dressed women whirl forward from the all female crowd. High kicking, hip grinding, buttock thrusting, arm punching, face making. It's a spectacle. At the drum master's behest, another three women leap forward to outdo them. But I'm not here for this or the machismo on show, on the pitch, but for simply sumptuous melons so near to Europe. Just seven days by sea, melon is a marvellous crop for northern Senegal. At the height of the growing season. On land leased to a French company, the community harvests up to 25 tonnes a day of the fragrant globes from the flat, windswept fields. When is a melon in its prime? In the welcome shade beneath the branches of a giant baobab tree at a field edge, I get my answer. Look here, says Mohammed Guy, a mighty man once chosen for elite football training in France. A knee injury put pay to that passion, so he switched to his other love, agriculture. Mohammed balances a perfect sphere of a melon in his hand. I follow his fingertip to the collar surrounding the stalk. See these little lines? Of course you can't, he teases. You English have no idea how to tell a ripe melon. You prefer to eat your fruit when it has the texture of wood and undersize. He should know the small percentage of fruit from these fields destined for British Shores has to be small and very underripe. French, Belgians, Swiss, they eat melons of all sizes. And when they're pungently ripe, so ripe, everything else in your fridge smells of melon too, laughs Mohammed. After Spain, Morocco, Guadeloupe and Brazil, now it's Senegal's turn to join the melon market. They have the sun, but soil. It's so sandy. Like farming a beach. It's great for root development, but roots need water. Northern Senegal has plenty of that too. I go almost to the mouth of the River Senegal. After a 650 mile curving journey right round the eastern border with Mali and Mauritania to the north, it joins the Atlantic. The sea used to flood inland to meet it, but now, with a bright yellow barrage at Diama, the sea is held back with the steady drone of diesel pumps. A tiny percentage of what flows seawards is lifted into a canal that winds to the melon fields. Water is not the only thing brought to the fields. Just before the plants begin to bloom, hives of bees are carried to the crop. Industriously, these beneficial insects assist pollination. Above them, darting acrobatically in the clear blue skies, African swallows, like squadrons of fighter bombers, patrol the plots, picking off flying pests for Africa's true depth of colour. Wait till the hour before nightfall. The football match is in its second half. The team shirts are now crimson red. The dusty pitch has a rosy glow. I walk through the village and see the lush family plots of vegetables grown with irrigation water too. Emerald rows of peanuts, chilies and tomatoes bejewelled with fruit. Madame Tian is my guide. An elder dressed head to toe in cobalt blue, she oversees the recruitment each day of teams of melon workers taking women and men evenly from. Look around, she points. Just three years ago, our main thought was getting enough to eat. Today, the village is a building site with income from melons. We're improving our homes. Now the villagers are preparing the next fields, moving the network of drip irrigation pipes. Then, in sheltered nurseries, they'll painstakingly plant melon seeds and nurture the young until they're big enough to transplant to the fields, ready for production to begin all over again. Final score. A thrashing 31 by the Casual staff. The winners finger un, deux, trois in the losers faces and laugh uproariously. Winners and losers alike make their chanting way to the melon packhouse, where a massive sound system is set up for a serious party. The exuberant dancing starts all over. Did I join in? That's for them to know. And me to keep quiet about.
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Kate Adie
I bet she did join in. Susie Emmett in Senegal, A lot of homes in the US are a little bit quieter this weekend. Up to 10 million American kids are off at summer camp. Joining them this year, Barack Obama's daughters, Malia and Sasha. The president said their absence might well cause him to shed a tear. Going to camp is an American tradition dating back to the 19th century. The traditional view of them as woody places with hiking, camping and campfires is, however, evolving today. They're just as likely to offer weight loss classes or to specialise in the teaching of languages, performing arts or music. Laura Trevelyan has sent her nine year old son to camp this summer and already she's hearing there are surprising results.
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Laura Trevelyan
On a lake in the state of Maine, close to the Canadian border, my middle son is living on an island with 85 other boys. There's no electricity, no running water, and something called a perch instead of a regular toilet. There are plenty of wild ducks or loons, as they are known in America, but that's about it. Boats of all sizes are the only form of transport. Welcome to the wilderness that is summer camp. This is the pioneering American spirit, alive and well and far from being Lord of the Flies, it seems. More swallows and Amazons. Mum, dad, I'm going to be a 100 per center, announced our beaming, sunburnt son when we went to visit him in this unfamiliar setting. A what? We inquired. I go skinny dipping every morning before breakfast, toby explained. And if I do that every day for six weeks, I'll be a 100 percenter. We nodded, trying vainly to understand the significance. I was going on a kayaking and camping trip this weekend, toby told us, but I stayed behind because you were visiting. I wanted to, he added hastily, though not altogether convincingly. Our son, who normally has to be yelled at to pick up his socks, was diligently sweeping out his already immaculate tent. Three other nine year olds were also wielding brooms and sweeping ferocious. We want to win Tydeus tent, they explained, an unusual ambition for nine year olds. The boys then fell to discussing their favourite expeditions and their dreams for the rest of camp. I hope King Cababa picks me to go on the sacred journey, said Toby earnestly. King Cababa? I asked faintly. He's the King of Pine island, chorused the boys enthusiastically, before racing into the lake for their compulsory weekly wash with soap. Across America, millions of children are experiencing the rituals of summer camp. President Obama's daughters are among those who have given up their regular lives for campfire mosquito bites homesickness, sleeping bags and communal living under the stars. Summer camp is a huge tradition in the US. It began in the 19th century. The writer Henry David Thoreau went to live in a cabin in New England and published an influential memoir about the benefits of life in a natural setting called Walden. In the age of the Industrial Revolution, it was considered beneficial to teach children the values of community and self reliance in the wilds. Each for all, all for each is the motto of one of the oldest camps in New England, along with Better faithful than Famous. These days, parents seize upon camp as a chance to unplug their children from the never ending electronic chatter of video games, mobile phones and email. Toby was surprised to learn that he couldn't telephone us from camp. There isn't even a landline on the island, just one mobile phone. In case of an emergency, parents are encouraged to write to their children. Children and we've eagerly awaited Toby's responses. The hastily scribbled postcards have been largely unrevealing. The activities are fun. Please send fudge. Love, Toby. I've signed up for archery and woodwork, read one card. I'm learning survival skills and I've made a spear. Where's that going to go when he gets home? We wondered, marvelling at what was happening far to the north of our home in New York City. The theory is that outdoor living provides an education just as important as the conventional academic year. Certainly I've seen my son grow in confidence and learn skills he could never acquire in the city, like tying knots and making a bonfire. Where else can he walk up a thousand metre mountain, camp by a lighthouse and fall asleep to the cry of loons? The unsung heroes of camp are the Count counsellors, teenagers who are assigned to look after the younger children. Simon is Toby's counsellor, the object of much hero worship. This saintly 18 year old has been sharing a tent with four 9 year olds for a month now and was on a well earned day off when we visited. But his word was still law. We'd smuggled some chocolate bars into camp, an illegal act, as it turned out. Mum, I'll take two bars to share with the others in secret. But you'll have to take the rest home, insisted Toby. I don't want to let Simon down with that. We left the island in the middle of the lake, waving goodbye from the boat as Toby and his friends chased one another through the trees.
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Kate Adie
And Laura Trevelyan, with that swallows and Amazons moment by the lake in Maine, brings this edition to a close. I'll be here with correspondence far and wide again next Saturday morning. I hope you'll join us. Goodbye.