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From Our Own Correspondent
Charlie Hebdo
00:28:15
Looking beyond the headlines: correspondents with insight and analysis consider: Hebdo...
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This is a download from the BBC. It's from our own correspondent. We make one version of the program for the BBC World Service, but this is the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ad.
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Good morning today, Charlie Hebdo and the way life used to be in France. In Germany, the Pegida movement saying, we knew something like this would happen. They're planning another big march in Dresden on Monday. Also today, stories from Mexico, Istanbul and from Antarctica, where a tourist gets her orders. Don't leave any yellow snow. But should visitors be allowed even to set foot in this, the last great wilderness on earth? Preparations are underway for a big unity march in Paris tomorrow. Several European heads of state, including David Cameron and Angela Merkel, will join President Hollande to express their solidarity after the three days of terror in France. This morning, French government ministers have been meeting to plan their next steps. There have been warnings of further attacks and Mr. Orlande has said the threat facing the country isn't over yet. The drama, which eventually ended with two ferocious assaults by the security forces yesterday, began on Wednesday with an attack on the officers of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Hugh Schofield was part of our reporting team as events unfolded.
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I have a memory of the first time I read Charlie Hebdo. It'll have been sometime in the 1970s and I was on a family camping holiday in the middle of France. How on earth it ended up in our possession, I've no idea. My parents were certainly not the kind of people to read obscene political cartoons. But I do remember what was in it. There'd been some demos outside a nuclear plant that was being built and a protester had died in clashes with police officers. I have a clear recollection of the front page, the ultimate caricature of a brutish French riot cop. A grinning bovine Uruk Hai in his hand, the blood dripping head of a long haired hippie, a nerdy teenager at the time, distinctly damp behind the ears. I remember thinking, we don't get much of that back home. But it was vaguely stirring. What audacity. The image was so grotesquely exaggerated that you knew the message lay deeper. They weren't just saying, we think the police are thugs. They were saying, we think the police are thugs. And to make our point, we're prepared to push to their limits any notion of taste, decency and accuracy. Why do we do it? Because we can. Because it's funny. Why not? Conservative types were shocked by Charlie Hebdo and they were supposed to be in those Days, the main target, apart from the police, was the Catholic Church. I've seen defecating popes, nuns in sex orgies, nuns in sex orgies, defecating on popes. Charlie Hebdo drew on an anti clerical tradition in France that goes way back in time. And at some point, the Church quite sensibly gave up complaining. In my mind, Charlie Hebdo merged with other childhood memories of France. Smelly loos at campsites, countryside that took your breath away, bosomy farmers, wives in patterned blue dresses, all that bucolic stuff and the chateau. And then this blast of raw anarchy. Instinctively, I knew it was all part of the mix. Quite possibly, the artist who drew that totally over the top picture of the French riot cop in the 70s was the cartoonist Cabu. That's another part of the mix. By the way, in France, if you want to be taken seriously as an anarcho agit prop illustrator, get yourself a nom de plume. In the obituaries this week, the cartoonists have all been designated by their nicknames. I don't think anyone cares what they're actually called. Caboo was definitely around and drawing for Charlie Hebdo back in the 70s, and he'd been around forever in his 80s. He still dressed like he did half a century ago, and his mop of young hair over a humorous old man's face made him look like a cross between Ronnie Corbett and Elton John. Anyway, Caboose dead now. He was murdered. I'll say that again. He was murdered. He was murdered for drawing pictures. Could Caboo possibly have imagined in his wildest nightmares, when he set out on his career taking on the establishment 60 years ago, that his last second this earth, would be that sudden noise at the door of the editorial meeting room? The incomprehension, the shouts, the shots. And then they say, which one's Kabu? And the Islamist Kalashnikov is pointing at your own head. That's how far the world has moved. Back when Kaboo started, it was police and the Pope. Now we have other things to worry about. And if there's one thing that everyone in the west frets about, it's Islam. It's Islamism. It's our country's relationship with Islam, and it's our fear of what the future holds in a world where Islam, once our neighbor, once our enemy, is now part of us. Kabu and the others knew this, and their reaction was to say, well, if you're part of us, then think like us, be like us. Understand that there is a difference between mockery and persecution, that words and pictures are just that. And that part of the deal is that we rise above offence. Yes, even when it's towards our religion. Kabu would have been gratified by the outpouring of support on the streets of France these last dreadful days. But he would probably also have said, where were you all when we needed you? He and the others stuck their necks out for freedom no one else did. I miss the world of the anarchic 70s when the worst that could happen when you showed a copulating Christ figure, was a letter in Le Figaro from Outrage de Aix les Bains. Now you die.
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Hugh Schofield in Paris. The organization campaigning against what it claims is the Islamicization of Europe is planning another big march through the German city of Dresden on Monday. Its rally earlier this week attracted widespread criticism. There were suggestions that the movement known as Pegida was damaging the country and its hard won image as a nation of tolerance. The former chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, said it pandered to hollow prejudices and xenophobia. But Jenny Hill says some people in Dresden and beyond believe Pegida has an important message and it's one which should be heard.
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Perhaps it's my imagination, but when the church bells of Dresden ring, it's as if they do so with a sense of pride. Because mourning in this city is beautiful. Almost every building lovingly reconstructed from the rubble of the Second World War. A cassocked priest hurries through an archway under the carved faces of angels and saints into a great baroque church. Traders unload their stalls. An early coachload of tourists lift their faces to gaze at the spires. But a few nights ago, I saw a very different side to Dresden. Vir sind das folk. They'd shouted. We are the people. Faces flared briefly in the orange light of a street lamp as thousands of chanting men and women marched past. I moved aside to avoid a large, rain streaked German flag. Germany for Germans. One man cried. I stepped in to talk to him, the crowd pressing round us. No mosques in Germany. He shouted. No mosques in Dresden. These rallies have been going on every week since October. They're organized by a group called pegida, an acronym which loosely translates into Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West. Their catchphrase, we are the people, is heavy with history. It was originally used by demonstrators in East Germany protesting against the oppression of of their communist regime. The people behind Pegida say they're not racist, they're not anti immigration, but they are worried about what they see as the growing influence of radical Islam and they're gaining support. Immigration is at a 20 year high in Germany, boosted by refugees fleeing violence in Syria and economic migrants from southern Europe. Pegida gives a voice to those who worry about the country's changing demographic. Although ironically, the movement's only really found substantial support here in the state of Saxony, which is home to very few immigrants and even fewer Muslims. I was surprised to see a small child in the crowd, squinting up through the rain at the people marching and shouting around her. Why had they come? I asked her mother. Holding her daughter's hand tightly. Ellie smiled and told me, I'm a refugee too. I'm a refugee from Offenbach, a city in western Germany. Seeing my confusion, she explained she felt she'd had to leave her home city. Offenbach, she said, is full of foreigners. You won't hear a German word. It's not a good situation if you have four blonde daughters. She marched on. As the crowd saw our camera, they began to chant, lugen presser. Volksfereiter. Lying press. Traitors to the people. His face grim, my German colleague explained the historical resonance of those words. Both terms were used by the Nazis. Like many Germans, Angela Merkel is horrified by the movement. In a public address, the Chancellor described those behind Pegida as having hatred, coldness and prejudice in their hearts. Don't join them, she urged. In fact, for every Pegida protest, there's usually a much larger counter demonstration. And tellingly, the larger anti Pegida protests have taken place in cities with substantial immigrant populations like Berlin. The atrocities of German history are not forgotten there. Tolerance is widely valued in Germany, foreigners welcomed, at least officially. While Pegida has been described as a national scandal. It's also ignited public debate and perhaps exposed some truths too about German attitudes. A recent study of non Muslim Germans found 50% see Islam as a threat, 61% believe the religion doesn't suit or fit into the Western world. The government here has been accused of ignoring legitimate concerns about immigration. Angela Merkel's conservatives are losing votes to Germany's newest party, alternativ for Deutschland. AfD, as it's known, campaigns for tighter migration controls and it's the only political party to publicly support Pegida. And on Monday, Pegida will march again. This time the demonstration in Dresden is being dedicated to the victims of the shootings in Paris. On after all, Pegida say they warned that something like this would happen. They've been accused of trying to capitalize on the attacks. But large crowds are expected in Dresden to march through a city which rose again from the devastation of war, where People are mindful of the past, but where some hope and many fear Germany's future could be shaped.
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And that's Jenny Hill. The right to freedom of speech is a topic being discussed widely in the aftermath of the violence in France. In Turkey, it's a debate being conducted amid some anxiety. Six broadcasters there have just been fined for breaching regulations by reading out on air some of the testimony given to a commission by four former government ministers who had been accused of bribery and corruption. They were told this week they would not, after all, have to stand trial. It was, as far as some sections of the media were concerned, a black day for democracy. But supporters of President Erdogan insist the allegations, which have been swirling around his government for the past couple of years, have been entirely manufactured by his enemies. And Mark Lohan says a campaign to silence them shows no sign of ending soon.
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Arrests these days can be very public affairs. At times they are still shielded from view, reported only hours later. But often now they are tweeted in real time, shared with millions worldwide as the police swoop. So it was with Frederika Gerdink last week, a Dutch journalist living in southeast Turkey. Terrorism Police just searched my house. Eight guys, she wrote on Twitter. They're taking me to the station now. Propaganda for a terrorist organization. She was questioned about her own tweets, which were said by the authorities to support the Kurdish militant group the pkk. She was later released. But the incident shook us Foreign journalists operating in a country where freedom of speech is on the decline. Perhaps it is that anarchic element of Twitter, that challenge to managed information that Turkey's government so dislikes. It tried to block Twitter almost a year ago after the site carried tapped phone calls alleging massive corruption among the ruling elite. The government hit back, claiming the leaks were illegally obtained, full of lies and driven by a parallel state of bureaucrats and journalists. Thousands of police and judges were sacked. Then last month came stage two, arresting opposition media as editors, scriptwriters, even TV directors were detained by police tweeted live. Naturally, one side of Turkey rose up. I dream of a country where anybody is free to say and think what they like, emre, a retired teacher, told me at an opposition rally. But that country is not Turkey. Cries from abroad grew louder. Turkey's raids on the press were against European standards and values, said Brussels. The EU should mind its own business, snapped the president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A war of words began between the club this country is negotiating to join and the Ankara government, which sees plots on all sides and A conspiracy to destabilize this rising power. Even before this government, journalists who stepped out of line were regularly imprisoned, whether for supporting Kurds or Armenians or challenging authority through investigation. Writers, reporters and intellectuals have long been targeted. Until last year, Turkey had the most journalists in jail of anywhere in the world, though it's now been eclipsed by other shining examples like Eritrea and Vietnam. This is a deeply nationalist country. It faces plenty of security challenges, and all too often it has clamped down on dissent. And yet, as the storm over the journalists arrests here grew, the president held firm. Nowhere is the press as free as in Turkey, he insisted, brushing aside the watchdog Reporters Without Borders, which rated Turkey 154 4th of 180 in the media Freedom Index. He says it because he knows his supporters believe it. Recently, I took refuge from the beating rain with two Erdogan loyalists in one of Istanbul's cozy cafes. The tea was piping hot, the baklava fresh. Businessman Ibrahim Yildirim told me Erdogan was his hero. The economy is booming, he said. The country in which my children will grow up will be bigger, stronger and richer. For student Zeynep Ilham, who wears the Muslim headscarf, it's the president's emphasis on his Islamic identity that counts. He's encouraged young girls to don the scarf in a country where for decades the pious felt ostracized by a secular elite that is the key to Erdogan's success. From abroad, Turkey is sometimes seen through the prism of Istanbul, a cosmopolitan, often European feeling metropolis where designer stores sit across the Bosphorus from the Blue Mosque. But that is only one side. Turkey's identity is far more complex. Much of it is profoundly conservative, its people enamored of a leader who finally gave them a political voice. All our politicians are corrupt, I often hear from Turks. But at least this one built us new hospitals and schools, and he allows us to be proud Muslims. It poses a huge challenge for Europe how to deal with a neighbor that is as single minded as it is important. The west desperately needs a democratic Turkey, but there's a nagging feeling that this country went halfway down that road, but is now veering off it. Recep Tayyip Erdogan was elected president with 52% of the votes. He splits Turkey down the middle, but for him, this slender majority is enough. Democracy is like a tram, he once said. You ride it until you reach your destination, then you get off. For Turkey's other half, his critics, the raids and clampdown on expression are further proof that the president bid fair farewell to the tram long ago.
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Mark Loewen in Istanbul, the Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto's been entertained at the White House this week. President Obama wants his help in implementing his changing policies on immigration and on Cuba. Mr. Pena Nieto, on the other hand, may have hoped his visit to Washington would help burnish his reputation after 12 months marked by scandal, corruption and violence. The event which has generated the most negative headlines for his country was the abduction and presumed murder of 43 college students, allegedly at the hands of local officials and police in league with a drug cartel. The president's trip coincides with the departure from Mexico of Will Grant, who's been our correspondent there for the last three years. Will says there's much he'll remember about the country, not least the bravery and stoicism of its mothers.
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The mother is the central figure in much of Mexican culture. The same could be said of a lot of Latin America, but in Mexico it is particularly prominent. It is not just in the obvious the ubiquitous image of Our lady of Guadalupe, for example, Mexico's Virgin Mary, like patron saint or the sacred, if somewhat saccharine nature of Mother's Day. It's present, too, in ancient Aztec, Olmec and Mayan cultures, such as Coatlikue, the Aztec goddess who gave birth to the stars and the moon, or Ezchel, the Mayan deity associated with fertility and childbirth. In modern day Mexico, there's a contradiction at the heart of the bond with the mother. On the one hand, she is revered and beloved. On the other, she is shorthand for all that is bad or worthless. Que padre, literally translated as how father, is slang for how cool. Meanwhile, le valemadres means couldn't give a damn, or to be precise, couldn't care. A mother. Suffice to say, it's a complicated relationship. I've met scores of mothers during my three years in Mexico, most of them proud, hard working and dignified women, many in the face of extreme adversity. A few have particularly stuck in my mind. In the state of Mexico, the populous urban area around Mexico City, I met Maria Angelica Peralta. If I say I was put in touch with her through the Mexican association of Stolen and Disappeared Children, you can imagine her story. In a poor neighborhood, we were welcomed into her family home and invited to a simple meal of meat tacos and guacamole with typical, generous Mexican hospitality. Suddenly it dawned on me that we'd descended on them on Mother's Day itself. By the time we asked Maria Angelica what had happened to her 19 year old son, Josue, who'd vanished from the street outside their home six months earlier. The tears had already started to spring to her eyes and those of her husband, angel, who sat beside her for moral support. Their story was, as I would find out, all too typical in Mexico's drug war ravaged towns and villages, missing young men disinterested or perhaps implicated local police desperate mothers leading tireless yet fruitless campaigns to find their loved ones or while also struggling to provide for their families. Such was the case of Elvira Gomez in the eastern state of Veracruz. Every time a mass grave is discovered, Elvira makes a grisly pilgrimage to the morgue, clutching photos of her two boys, aged 18 and 21, to see if any of the remains are theirs. Living with the uncertainty is the worst part, elvira said. It's like I'm sleepwalking, her voice cracking. But some mothers know what happened to their sons. In the northern border state of Sonora, I met songwriter Carolina Chan. By her own definition, one of the lucky ones. She at least has a grave to visit and lay flowers at for her teenage son, Marco Antonio. Dreaming of a life in the United States, he set off one day without saying goodbye. As the weeks went by with no word, Carolina finally tracked down someone who'd traveled with him on the fateful journey as soon as she'd heard that he got left behind in the desert. Senora, she said, she knew he was dead. It was only detective work by a particularly conscientious group of people at the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office in Arizona, which ensured Marco Antonio's body was identified and sent back to Carolina for a decent burial. Now, of course, there are 43 more mothers who are suffering in Guerrero State after a group of student teachers were abducted by the local police and apparently murdered. Shortly after I returned from the now infamous town of Iguala, my own mother came to Mexico for her first visit to Latin America. It felt like a balm to have her there, to show her firsthand the country that has so beguiled and fascinated me since I was a student. We spent days enjoying the side of Mexico that all too often gets lost amid the reporting of the drug war, Mexico City's extraordinary culture and cuisine, an afternoon lost in the anthropology museum, a trip along the canals of Xochimilco, crossing the mountains of Oaxaca to the Pacific coast. We climbed the Pyramid of the sun in the incredible Aztec site of Teotihuacan and looked down the Avenue of the Dead to the Pyramid of the Moon, one of the most impressive locations anywhere in the country. Exhilarating. Just wonderful, she murmured. At the summit, she was talking about the view. Yet despite all the violent news stories, I'd say the same thing about my time in Mexico.
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And that was Will Grant, who's now setting up at the BBC bureau in the Cuban capital, Havana. Now, the images we've all seen of the state of the ice caps at the Earth's poles have been a key part of our understanding of global warming. Here at the world's extremes, the effects of climate change can appear most graphic and most disturbing. But in Antarctica, you won't see any starving polar bears or beleaguered local communities melting through the permafrost because there aren't many mammals about and no human residents except the scientists holed up in research stations. But there are visitors. 37,000 tourists are expected in Antarctica this season, although some 10,000 of them will never go ashore. Juliet Ricks has just been, and she's returned with questions about the continent's future.
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Enfolded in two glacial arms, the water of the bay sparkles ultramarine, flecked with ice lilies and dotted with floating Birgie bits. A sheer cliff towers dark above us, flanked by snow slopes as pure white as the glistening fronts of the little Adlie penguins, whose spectacled eyes peer curiously around as they waddle and toboggan about their business. This is Brown Bluff on the Antarctic Peninsula, and I feel intensely privileged to be here, togged up in layer upon layer of fleece topped with vivid red wet skins, I am all too aware that this is not my habitat. Like a scuba diver under the sea, I am an alien visitor in the penguins world. Which makes me wonder, should I be here at all? Am I just by setting foot on this extraordinary continent, polluting the last great wilderness on Earth? All visitors leave a footprint, admits my tour leader, Boris Wise of One Ocean Expeditions. And we all tend to go to the same places the accessible coastline, which is also where the penguins and seals go to breed. Nonetheless, he argues, carefully controlled tourism is not just ok but useful. Without a native population of its own, Antarctica needs advocates, and tourism creates a global constituency of people ready to support and indeed fund its preservation. Not everyone is convinced that the benefits outweigh the risks, but most are pragmatic. It's better to have a certain level of responsible tourism than for it to go under the radar, says Jane Rumble, head of polar Regions at the Foreign Office in London. So how to be responsible? About half the tourist ships here are like ours, flagged to Antarctic Treaty countries and legally bound by the treaty's environmental standards. Of the other half, most are at least part of the International Maritime Organisation, which is just introducing a stricter polar code. And all the tour companies regularly operating here are members of the International association of Antarctic Tour Operators, which also works within the Antarctic Treaty system. As our ship crosses 60 degrees south into Antarctica, we're given a mandatory briefing before gathering in the ship's mudroom for a vacuum party. To the music of aptly named bands Passenger and the Black Seeds, we bio secure ourselves, hoovering our clothes and kit and disinfecting our boots to ensure we introduce no alien species to Antarctica. Does this really work? Apparently it does. Non native species have been accidentally introduced to the region, but not, as far as anyone knows, by tourists. In fact, research suggests that national scientific programs may have much more environmental impact than tourism. Scientists, of course, argue that they also bring more benefit, including crucial understanding of how changes in the Antarctic link to changes in the global environment. Our ship never docks. We anchor and go ashore by bio secured Zodiac. There's no eating or smoking on land and we're instructed to take nothing away except photographs and leave nothing behind, not even a bit of yellow snow. So, grins Boris, don't drink too much at breakfast. We may go no nearer than five metres to any Antarctic wildlife, we're told. But nobody told the penguins. And although we never touch, we have delightfully close encounters, especially with the confident little red beaked Gentoos. One passenger is allowed to get as close as he likes. He is Phil McDowell, marine biologist and penguin counter from the research organisation Oceanites, who is hitching a lift on our ship to monitor the penguin colonies we visit. Gentoos are thriving, Phil tells me, increasing in both number and range. Adelies and the little helmeted chinstrap penguins, however, are in decline. The Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by an average of 3 degrees centigrade in the last 60 years. Winds have shifted, changing the pattern of the sea ice. It is global warming that is changing the penguins fortunes, Phil suggests, not tourism. But there are concerns. Tourist numbers look set to rise and membership of AYATO is voluntary. The ships are starting to offer activities like kayaking, mountaineering and diving, which are potentially more invasive than simply looking. Back in London, enjoying my photos of ethereal ice scapes and brilliantly comic penguins, I wonder, should I feel guilty for having been in Antarctica? I turn back to polar expert Jane Rumball. No, she tells me, just do what you can to preserve it.
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And that was Juliet Ricks in Antarctica, bringing today's edition to a close. And don't forget, you can hear our correspondence stories from the furthest corners of the planet anytime you like by downloading our program podcast. But we'll be here again next Saturday morning, and I hope you'll join us. Until then, goodbye.