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From Our Own Correspondent
Cairo at the Crossroads
00:28:06
Jon Leyne in Cairo reflects on the debate about Egypt's future. Will it be or Secular...
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Hello, this is the.
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From our own correspondent office at Broadcasting
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House in London, You've downloaded the latest
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edition of the programme we've made for
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BBC Radio 4 and it's introduced today by Alan Little.
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Today, Egypt at the crossroads. Dictatorship or democracy, secular or religious, the Indian tea industry under threat. Change is on the way to the traditional tea plantations of Assam. The Islamist takeover of Timbuktu leaves a famous history singer in Mali lost for words and well fermented. It's a fish dish the Norwegians love, but to our man up the fjords, it smells like a piece of sushi that's been on a long bus journey. In the Egyptian capital, Cairo, it's another day of demonstrations for and against the country's new president, Mohamed Morsi. His opponents say he's assuming the same sort of dictatorial powers which led to the downfall of his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak. But his supporters are expected to turn out in large numbers. Their rally is at Cairo University. They say they want to avoid clashes with opposition supporters on the streets. So is Egypt, as some suggest, on its way to further sectarian conflict, even civil war? Or is the fiery rhetoric of the last few days simply democracy, long suppressed, finding its voice at last? John Lyne is in Cairo.
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We were headed towards the Cairo Judges Club to hear their reaction to President Morse's edict granting himself sweeping new powers. I had visions of a faded old gentleman's club with frayed leather sofas, portraits of the founders on the wall, perhaps with the old buffers sitting round a crackling log fire. But no, this was quite different. Hundreds, probably thousands, of furious judges and lawyers were crammed into a huge, elaborately decorated hall in the middle of the law courts. It resembled a Victorian Gothic cathedral, or perhaps Grand Central Station in New York. There are so many of these wonderful old buildings in Cairo, slowly rotting away or falling down through neglect. It was a reminder that amidst the current turmoil in Egypt, this is a country of real, faded glories. Egyptians are fed up with that, and they've joined battle for the country's future. It was strange enough being at a protest rally by judges. The legal profession here is incandescent about President Morse's declaration that he is above the law, an edict that appears to give him almost limitless power. They eventually decided to go on strike. Outside the building, there was an even stranger sight at exactly the spot where I watched the revolution begin on January 25th last year. The last revolution, I joke. Thousands more protesters were there, voicing their support for the judges. Then, after some particularly Noisy fireworks. The police decided they'd had enough. They launched barrage after barrage of tear gas into the terrified crowd and pitched in with batons flailing. So the riot police, who last year used the same tactics to defend President Mubarak, were charging into a crowd of pro revolution protesters demonstrating in support of another branch of the forces of law and order, the judges. That dramatic chaotic scene shows what a mess this topsy turvy country has got itself into. Some of those demonstrating against President Morsi actually voted for him last year. They saw him as the candidate of the revolution. But now those former supporters are accusing the President of acting like the dictator he replaced. Those opponents of the President also fear this is a takeover bid by the Muslim Brotherhood attempting to impose their Islamist ideology on the country, a view reinforced by the decision of the Constitutional assembly to rush through a draft constitution on Thursday night, strongly leaning towards Islamic values. President Morsi's current supporters, meanwhile, rail against the remnants of the old regime, spitting out the description of them as foulool and a word that means something like the dregs. These foulool are accused of trying to sabotage the transition to democracy. It is true that most of the legal establishment was appointed during Hosni Mubarak's time, if not directly by the President. The courts have already dissolved the People's assembly, the lower house of Parliament and the Constitutional assembly, both on slightly uncertain legal grounds. Those same judges, fighting so ferociously now for their independence never seemed to be quite so outspoken when they came under pressure from former President Mubarak. And what's become so poisonous about this current dispute is the way Egypt has divided into camps. Almost literally. Those camped in the middle of Tahrir Square represent liberals, some Christians, and those who want a secular future for Egypt. Ranged against them are the Muslim Brotherhood and and their Islamist allies, including the even harder line Islamists known as Salafists. The fear of many Egyptians is not just that President Morsi wants to entrench his powers, but the Islamists want to entrench the power of Islam in the constitution, bringing this country nearer, if not all the way to becoming an Islamic republic. So there are two ways of seeing this. It could be a really dangerous division, but potentially leading to sectarian conflict and major loss of life. Some serious commentators have even warned of the threat of civil war. Or it could be the revival of something this country has not seen for many long real politics. An open and extremely lively debate over the country's future. Because make no mistake, this is about what kind of country Egypt is going to be. Dictatorship or democracy, secular or religious, any historian will tell you what changes a country is not so much what happens during a revolution, but how it turns out afterwards. Just look back at Iran, Russia, or indeed Egypt after the 1952 revolution. So this could be a huge turning point for Egypt and potentially the Middle East.
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That's John Line in Cairo. Nearly 25 years after the worst chemical weapons attack ever carried out against civilians, there are calls for exhumations to be carried in the town of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan. It's thought at least 5,000 people died after Saddam Hussein's forces dropped a cocktail of nerve and chemical agents on the town. Now there's talk of opening the mass graves where many of the victims are buried, both to identify those who died and to establish who supplied the mix of chemicals used in the attack. Ed Butler has been in Kurdistan, meeting some of the survivors.
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Cemeteries may take on all kinds of shapes and styles, but somehow visiting Halabja's biggest burial ground feels unique. An open path winds up a hill. Dusty headstones on each side all commemorate, in their own way, the enormous mass grave that lies beneath our feet. They recall families, in some cases an entire street full of the dead. Men, women and children gassed together on a single day in 1988. Aris Abd Akram comes here every week. He remembers the Iraqi planes flying overhead, the sweet stench of the gas, and then being overwhelmed by it and passing out. It took two days for him to recover sufficiently to make his way back home. And then he discovered the terrible truth. Brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, all lying dead in the family basement. Despite his own injuries, he somehow managed, with the help of a local truck driver, to bring them all here. It was little more than a field full of bomb craters at the time, and here he buried them all, 24 of his dead relatives, with his own hands. God help me to do it, he says simply. You would have done the same in my place. The attack is thought to have been an act of punishment by Saddam Hussein. It was the tail end of the Iran Iraq war, and some Kurds had been seen to celebrate a recent Iranian advance. So after two days of conventional bombing, the Iraqi air force moved in with a cocktail of nerve agents like Sarin, Taban and vx. And they also dropped mustard gas, the slowest killer of them all, which still pollutes the very ground on which we stand. Pointing to the family headstone, Aras sheds a tear and then quietly wipes it away. There's still pain, he says. It never stops. It's a common refrain among the survivors in Halabja. Many still carry chronic injuries to the lungs and the eyes. Many more have children with birth defects. Rates of cancer are high, but it's the emotional wounds that remain the deepest. At the local high school, teenage girls too young to have witnessed the attack themselves listen obediently as the teacher gives a modern history class. But this isn't like any class I've seen. One by one, the girls stand up when it's their turn to speak, and one by one, each of them starts to cry as they share stories of broken families and lost kin. And then the teacher himself breaks down. It seems that he, too, is a survivor, although the very meaning of that term seems somehow different. In this town, history is alive. Here, history is shared. Aras shakes our hands as we prepare to leave the cemetery and says that he's glad we've come. It's better that everyone remembers, he says. No one must forget. But there's something else he wants to say. Apparently, several months after the attack, he found himself with other refugees in a camp in another part of Kurdistan. Saddam's soldiers came by. They started rounding up the young men, he said, forcibly conscripting them into the Iraqi army. Remarkably, Aras found himself posted as a guard in Fallujah, supervising one of Saddam's biggest and most lethal chemical weapons facilities there. The awful irony of this situation took me aback. How on earth could you stand it? I asked him. Well, I had no choice, he tells me. I had to do what I was told or I would have been killed all the same. As I saw them making up those bombs, all I could think was, who's next? Who else will they use this on? It's nearly a quarter of a century since Halabjah was attacked, and Saddam and his henchman, Chemical Ali, are both dead, their convictions by a tribunal and their executions based significantly on what happened here. But the Kurdish regional government wants action against the manufacturers of the lethal chemicals as well. A number of companies, most of them Russian and German, it's thought, have been implicated. And to identify the culprits for sure, the Kurds say the mass graves of the victims will have to be reopened and tests conducted. For some survivors like Aras, it's a troubling prospect. The graves are polluted, the graves are dangerous, he says. And personally, I'd rather die than have the bodies of my family disturbed. But others take a different view. Some don't even know where their relatives are buried, whether they might even somehow miraculously have escaped, fled abroad, survived that uncertainty is for many a torment, and for them the opening of the graves may be the only way to move forward. It will take a hundred years for us to come to terms with what happened here, one woman tells me. But if the world finally recognizes these crimes, if those responsible pay for what they help to create, then at least that will begin to bring us some peace. This is a permanent scar in our hearts.
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And you can hear the documentary Ed Butler's been producing in Halabja on Monday evening here on Radio 4. Now Mali used to be regarded as an oasis of calm in a troubled West African neighbourhood. Tourists wondered at the treasure trove, which Timbuktu used to be, until Islamist militants seized control there six months ago. Now, with reports of summary executions and the destruction of famous shrines, it's gained a different sort of reputation, that of the Afghanistan of Africa. When our correspondent Celeste Hicks was based there five years ago, the place was something of an international hub for musicians. She's been back trying to find out what Mali's famous singers make of developments in their country.
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It's a typical sultry night in Bamako. Cicadas tweet against the rumble of distant traffic. A few stragglers from tonight's concert are propped up against the bar, sipping Castel beer as the lights come on. It's well after midnight when NowaDambia's manager sneaks me in through the stage door. The sight of one of Mali's most famous griots, or praise singers, takes me by surprise. In the harsh dressing room light, I realize she's a lot older than she seemed in the concert. I can see heavy lines of penciled eyebrows and makeup, and she's taken off her wig to reveal short, graying plaits. I say hello, but she doesn't hear me. She's just gazing into the mirror in front of her, which is missing a few bulbs. She's rubbing together one or two banknotes, gifts from fans in her hands, her lips moving almost imperceptibly. Hello, Nawa, I say again, louder. I'm from the BBC. I'd like to do an interview with you about Malian musicians response to the crisis. She lifts her head briefly in a glimmer of acknowledgment. Tomorrow, come to my house. And then back to her reverie. Nawa's house is deep in the suburbs, and as my taxi weaves its way through rubbish and mud, children run alongside, squealing in delight and indicating the Are you going to see Nawa Dumbia? Asks the driver in amazement Nawa's interview is, to put it bluntly, a challenge. Yes, she's upset about the coup. Of course she wants peace. But her answers are curt. No KILLER SOUNDBITE to make my radio report come alive, I crunch unhappily on the ground nuts she's given me and swirl them down with lurid orange aid. I try again. Look, what do you expect me to say? She blurts out suddenly. I've sung. I've said I want peace. Can we talk about something else? That night I lie awake until the early hours of the morning, irritated by the clutch of itchy mosquito bites on my ankle and the tick, tick, tick of the ceiling fan lazily turning in my hotel room. I wonder why it's proving so hard to do a good report about the cultural response to the crisis. Griot singers like Nawa keep alive the country's oral history dating back to Mali's first king, Sunjata Keita, who, according to legend, couldn't walk until he was seven. It had always seemed to me that these people spoke for the nation. I had imagined that they would be the ones calling for peace and national unity. But the musicians, like Nauer, like most other people, seem dazed by the rapid and devastating reversal in the country's fortunes. Bamako still looks brown and grubby and still smells of diesel fumes and roasting yams. But despite brave shows of normality, like wedding celebrations in the street, the sense of uncertainty is palpable. Almost everyone I speak to, from waitresses to ministers, is asking, why? How could this have happened to such a famously peaceful place? Malians are trying to come to terms with the country's effective splitting in two by the Islamist takeover of the north. The loss of some of the world's best historical sites, such as Timbuktu, the fabled desert city and centre of Islamic learning, has been a real blow to the country's self esteem. Take, for example, the thousands of ancient Arabic manuscripts describing myriad subjects from astronomy to Islamic law, trapped in abandoned libraries across the city. My visit to see the director of one of these libraries in exile, in a sterile office in a noisy suburb of Bamako, is depressing. He puts a brave face on it and calls for international protection for the books, but the closest we can get to them is to click dolefully on images on his computer. Can cultural figures speak for a nation? There are some signs that the youth are engaging. A new group called sofa, or warriors of the Republic have organized concerts and public debates. But the image of Nawa Dumbia sitting alone on the empty veranda of her palatial home. She's half the size she appears on stage, will not leave me. I think she was sad that night because the concert had not been a success. The few banknotes in her hands were barely enough to cover the cost. As a griot, she's the one who will have to record this whole sorry episode to be passed down to the next generation. It's no wonder she doesn't want to talk about it.
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And that was Celeste Hicks. India is renowned for its tea, but it has slipped to fourth place in the table of tea exporters. Recent figures show international international sales continue to decline. The industry depends heavily on the reputation for quality of its two most famous brands, Assam and Darjeeling. But Mark Tully, who's been to visit the plantations in the northeast of the country, says the reputation of Assam, once rock solid and famed far and wide, is under threat. This, he tells us, is casting a shadow over the future of the region's traditional tea estates.
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Spending the night in an old fashioned British Raj bungalow on a tea estate in Assam, I was awoken at six in the morning by a siren. For more than a thousand men and women, this was the alarm call which got them out of bed to prepare. For eight hours plucking tea, planting new tea bushes, weeding, digging ditches or doing any of the other tasks required to produce high quality tea. Assamti estates look like a vast billiard tablecloth. Acre after acre of squat green tea bushes huddled together and kept flat by regular plucking. The tea estate I stayed on was run in the military manner that my autocratic uncle used to manage his estate during the British Raj. The planters attending the early morning meeting are the officers. They still wear the traditional uniform shorts and long socks. The senior manager is the commanding officer. He lives in a bungalow whose splendor is a symbol of his authority. The officers mess is the local planters club founded by the British. Twirling a white magnificent military moustache, Deraj, the soldierly senior advisor to the company which owns the tea estate, said to me, this regimental system worked for the British and it has worked throughout my 50 years in tea. The soldiers, the workers, live on the estate in what have always been known as labour lines. The early British planters couldn't find workers locally, so labour contractors collected not just men, but women and children too, from distant parts of India and sent them on boats up the Brahmaputra river, which flows through Assam. The conditions on the long journey were so hazardous that it wasn't uncommon for Half the workers to die before they reached the estates. Many of today's tea plantation workers are descendants of the people who somehow survived that journey. Devraj said workers are now looked after from womb to tomb. Apart from their wages agreed by the government and their homes, they get free rations, wood for cooking and electric. There is a hospital and a school on the estate too. The old fashioned paternalistic style of management makes workers very expensive. But Devraj opposes reducing their number by mechanising the tea plucking. Watching women nimbly plucking the bright green new leaves off the top of tea bushes, he explained that machines can't differentiate between stalks and leaves and went on to say a mixture of leaves and stalks, which is what you get with a machine, doesn't make good tea. But now the tea estates Devrad supervises may be forced to mechanize because there's a shortage of people willing to pluck tea and maintain the bushes. He puts this down to the low social status of tea garden work and the survival of another tradition, the designation of workers as coolies. Devraj says, the young people tell us that they may have been born as coolies, but they're not prepared to be known as that for the rest of their lives. The ever increasing number of smallholders who grow tea represent another threat to the quality of Assam tea. The smallholders beat the estates on price because they don't have the same high costs. The problem is that they don't match the estate's quality. There are also estates which don't maintain the quality of their tea. Devrage insists that no bush on an estate he supervises should be above 40 years old because after that the quantity and quality of the leaf declines. Nevertheless, uprooting and replanting is very expensive. So a number of estate owners retain bushes as long as they produce some leaf, no matter what its quality may be. Poor quality tea undermines the Assam brand and it's only because of the brand's reputation for quality that the tea competes with the leaf produced in Kenya and Vietnam, where costs are much lower. So protecting the brand is vital for Indian tea exports, which have fallen by 12% over the last five years. But Devraj says you can only maintain quality if you manage tea estates as I've seen them managed for the last 50 years.
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Mark Tully reporting from the tea estates in Assam. Now, not all European countries are in the wintry grip of austerity, trying to escape from under mountains of debt. No, there is a place not so far away where spending continues. Unemployment is almost non existent. And where the future looks bright. Norway's 5 million people enjoy one of the highest standards of living not just in Europe, but in the world. So what's the secret of its success? Might it be something to do with diet? Kieran Cook's been up into the mountains north of the capital Oslo to investigate.
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Take a selection of overripe cheeses, place them in the midst of a pile of dirty wet soccer kit, leave for a week. Now you have the nasal numbing smell of Rockfisk, one of the great Norwegian delicacies. I'm in the small town of Faggerens, about three hours from Oslo. The snow, spectacular scenery and that odour ever present hangs in the air. Rockfisk is trout sprinkled with salt and fermented in water for depending on how smelly you like your fish up to a year. As the dark sets in and the weather turns cold, Norwegians flock to a festival here in Fagarens devoted to this most well captivating of food. You eat it raw and then swallow a glass of aquavit, says Hervard Helvason, full time local firefighter, but also the so called Rockfist general in charge of running the festival. All around us people are eating little cubes of the fish and knocking back quantities of drink. Some people like the aquavit more than the rockfist, says Harvard. The drink can kill the smell. I try a few pieces. If you can avoid passing it under your nose, it's not bad. Not unlike a slice of sushi that has been on rather a long bus journey. Rockfisk is a product of very different poverty stricken times in Norway, when pre refrigeration fish was soaked in airtight barrels of water and salt in autumn and then in the depths of winter and well and truly fermented, taken out and no doubt with the senses knocked out by alcohol. Eton Only a generation ago, thousands of Norwegians were forced to leave their country in search of work, emigrating mainly to the US. Now the population is expanding fast. More than 13% are immigrants, attracted by plentiful jobs, high wages and a comprehensive care system. People from Sweden, the old rival and not so long ago far richer than Norway, stream in to work. Rockfisk is seen as signifying something important, a vital if rather smelly part of Norway's past. It's among the more expensive dishes you can buy. But then everything in Norway is expensive. A small glass of beer or a sandwich knocks you back nine pounds each. The growth since the early 1970s of one of the world's biggest oil and gas industries lies behind much of Norway's present day wealth. But oil isn't the only reason we are doing so well, says Anna, handing round trays of maturing ruckfisk and with her long blond hair and startling blue eyes, the image of Nordic well being. We are a, how you say, prudent people. Her English, like that of most people here, is flawless. We are not very showy. We don't like ostentation. Norway has handled its oil wealth very carefully. All but a small percentage of money from the industry is invested in a special fund for the benefit of future generations. When everyone else was throwing around money they didn't have in the years leading up to the global financial crash, Norway kept its purse strings tightly bound. As long as we can ski in winter and go hiking in summer, we are happy, said Anna. And eat ruckfisk, she adds with a carefree laugh. I stand in the snow and queue for something to eat. I've had enough of ruckfisk now. An elk burger is certainly something different and rather succulent to the taste, but in the evening it's more of that smelly fish. The hotel I'm staying in is one of a number of venues hosting a rockfist dinner where guests vote on the best or perhaps the most nasally challenging fish. There's a live TV link up to a comp air in a bow tie surrounded by plates of rockfish. It's like the Eurovision Song Contest. What score do you have for the best fish up there in the mountains? Thor Jorgen Here are our points. Harvard There is clapping, laughter. A man falls off his chair, perhaps overcome with aquavit. Or maybe it's the fumes from all that fish.
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Kieran Cook in Norway Time for us to go. And do you know, I think we might just pass on the fish dish this lunchtime. Kate's back next Saturday. Do join us all then. Goodbye.