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From Our Own Correspondent
Cities on Edge
00:27:57
Correspondents' stories: Jeremy Bowen on the effect in Egypt of the upcoming trials of...
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- [00:00]
A
Hello from the. From our own correspondence studios at Broadcasting House in London, you've downloaded the latest edition of the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Hello. Today, cities on edge. The security forces in Egypt on alert as senior members of the Muslim Brotherhood go on trial. And these are nervous days in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. We hear how recent riots there have changed the country forever. Why women are doing the heavy lifting at a European outpost in Africa. And a shock for our man back in Moscow. Have Russians really learned how to smile? The deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi goes on trial on Monday, along with 14 other senior Muslim Brotherhood figures. At least 1,000 people, including members of the police and army, were killed in outbreaks of violence which followed the overthrow of Mr. Morsi. Since then, the security forces have detained numerous leaders and supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. This week, they arrested ESAM Al Arian, deputy leader of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party. Jeremy Bowen, who's met Mr. El Aryan and several of the other Islamists up in court next week, says the trial seems certain to create yet more upheaval in Egypt.
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I wasn't surprised to see Issam Al Arian with a big smile in the photo released by Egypt's Interior Ministry after his arrest. He smiles a lot. Before President Mubarak was overthrown in February 2011, I used to meet Issam on one of the islands in the River Nile in Cairo, in a scruffy flat that back then was the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood. After the revolution, they moved into a spanking new hq. It was burnt down during the coup against the Brotherhood in the summer. Issam, it was always first names with him, was friendly to Western journalists. He used to answer his mobile phone, make jokes and agree to interviews. Not all the other leaders of the Brotherhood were as obliging. His loyalty to the group seemed absolute, but he didn't fit into its austere template. He is, of course, very religious. Like many pious Muslims, he sports a callous caused by rubbing his forehead on a prayer mat and during the five daily acts of worship. Once I told Issam that I wasn't religious. He seemed shocked, even concerned. And as the BBC team left his office, he called back Angie, our Egyptian producer, for a pep talk. As we went back down the narrow, dusty stairs, Angie, who wears a headscarf, said he told her to make a big effort to explain how important religion was in any life. He said, look, Angie, you're free, you're working, you're veiled. What's the problem. Talk to that man and explain religion to him. People like him don't understand. Religion defines lives in the Middle east in a way that many people who grew up in secular Europe can find hard to understand. It took me a while to grasp the idea when I first went to live in the region. The Muslim Brotherhood has deep roots in Egypt, Russia, which is why I think the military's current crackdown is not, in the long term, going to be any more successful than all the other attempts it's made to neuter the Brotherhood in the last 60 years. The Muslim Brotherhood pioneered and established modern political Islam. After it was founded in 1928, it spread quickly through Muslim countries. By the 1940s, some members of the Brotherhood turned to violence. In the 1950s, the government of Egypt's most charismatic president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, set out to crush the Brotherhood, jailing, sometimes executing its leaders, activists and thinkers in prison. There were many debates about the gradualist ideology of the Brotherhood, and the movement split. One of the offshoots eventually evolved into Al Qaeda. Its Palestinian branch produced the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas. But the core of the movement stayed patient and non violent, deepening its influence by providing the closest thing poor Egyptians had to a welfare state. Everyone expected Mohamed Morsi to win the presidential election that followed the Egyptian Revolution. Isamal Arian always used to insist that the Brotherhood's conversion to democracy was genuine, that it wouldn't be a question of one person, one vote, one one time. Senior Western diplomats in Cairo told me they were convinced. But in government, President Morsi and his people were incompetent, alienated too many Egyptians and the army removed them from power. In the coup in July this year, Isamal Arian was due to be tried in absentia along with President Morsi and the other leaders. But now he'll be joining them in the dock. One of the charges concerns a jailbreak from Cairo's Torah Prison. And during the uprising against President Mubarak in 2011, the Muslim Brotherhood leaders had, as usual, been rounded up and sent to jail. Issam told me about six months after Mubarak was overthrown that criminals in Torah Prison had smashed their way out and that he'd followed with Morsi and the others. Some accounts say that Mubarak's Interior Minister, Habib Al Adli, had allowed a mass jailbreak to try to discredit the uprising by associating it with chaos. The leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood draws credibility from jail time. Issam told me how he was tortured in prison after one of the Brotherhood's violent splinter groups assassinated President anwar Sadat in 1981. He's dismissive about arrest, calling it the usual thing. In Issam's words, even when Nasser was killing some of our leaders, he couldn't kill our beliefs. Isam Al Arian is now back in Torah prison with Mohamed Morsi and the rest of the Brotherhood's leadership. Hosni Mubarak is there too, with his sons and his chief lieutenants, including Habib al Adli. I doubt they're all in the same wing, but if they did sit down to lunch together, imagine the table talk.
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And that was Jeremy Bowen. They're poised for court cases in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum as well. Some 60 people are to stand trial for their role in a series of violent protests which took place there in September. During the unrest, security forces opened fire on demonstrators. At least 50 people were killed. President Omar Al Bashir, speaking to parliament this week, accused those detained of subversion, sabotage, looting and killing. He accused them of trying to topple his government. James Kopnell says Sudans had a troubled, often violent history, but the recent unrest shocked people in Khartoum and left many frightened and nervous.
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Khartoum is not one city, but three, arranged around the spot where the White Nile merges with the blue to flow north through the desert as the Nile proper. In Khartoum itself, wide avenues splay out from roundabouts like spokes on a wheel near sturdy old colonial era buildings. Doughty dames in need of a bit of makeup, but still undeniably beautiful. Omdurman to the west is more cramped, less grandiose. At the weekend, though it seems the very heart of Sudanese life. The sun sets on the whirling dervishes, Sufi mystics spinning themselves into religious ecstasy. Supporters of Sudan's two footballing giants, Al Hilal and Al Mirhair, head to their neighbouring stadiums, playing out the eternal and worldwide divide between the Blues and the Reds. The third part of the urban trio, the Khartoum north, is more industrial, but also the home of the new super rich, many of whom have enviable political connections. Sudan has been devastated by civil wars for most of its independent history, but these conflicts, in which millions have died, have mainly taken place in outlying regions in what was then Southern Sudan. Since 2011, an independent nation, and in Darfur, South Kordofan, Blue Nile and the East. The capital's sons have been killed in these conflicts, but the Tri City itself has largely been spared. Omal Bashir, who's been in power since his 1989 coup has always been able to argue that he and his government were keeping the people of the centre safe from the angry hordes on the periphery. Not everybody believed it, but the capital was cosseted and this made the events of late September 17th so shocking to many here. The trouble started when fuel subsidies were removed. The price of petrol almost doubled, with knock on effects for food and other basics, and thousands took to the streets to protest. Pungent smoke from flaming tires leaked into the sky. Demonstrators ransacked officers belonging to Bashir's National Congress Party as well as petrol stations. The protesters were frustrated and increasingly poor people, distressed by the deteriorating economy and by their own prospects. Later on, anti government figures tried to give the protests a more political tone, though not always with great success. I started chanting well known slogans about overthrowing the regime, one man told me. But the crowd didn't really join in. Their anger at the authorities may have been unfocused, but it was real enough. This same group destroyed a small police station. There have been many protests in Khartoum over the years. These were different. The security forces used live bullets almost at once, Doctors say protesters were shot in the face and the chest. One Khartoum resident told me about a friend who was shot three times from behind. Like almost everyone else I've talked to, the person did not want to be identified. I've never seen people in Khartoum so nervous. The exact death toll may never be known, but the impact on the capital has been profound. For once, the gunshots, funerals and wailing relatives were in the Tri City capital, not some remote province. This has changed Sudan forever, I was told over and over. I met one friend, a well off businessman, for coffee. He had voted for the NCP at the last elections, but was appalled at what happened before. I thought there was no alternative, he said. But now the people cannot accept the ncp. I wondered why there hadn't been a similar reaction to the deaths in Darfur or Southern Sudan. There is a big difference between hearing it and seeing it, he said. This really hit home. Everyone has a relative or knows someone who is affected here. An NCP official, Rabi Abdelati, told me there may have been some innocent victims, but most of those who were killed were criminals. Human rights groups say the dead were innocent protesters. Whatever the case, the almost unprecedented use of lethal force on the streets of Khartoum stopped the protests in their tracks. The crackdown in the capital shows how scared the government is, and it has changed the way many of the people of the Tri City think about The NCP on top of all this, the economy is unlikely to get better soon.
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James Koppnell in Sudan. Next to Melilla, the tiny Spanish territory on the north coast of Morocco, it's one of only two land borders the European Union has on the continent of Africa, the other being Ceuta, another Spanish enclave west along the coast. The wealth of first World Melilla contrasts sharply with the poverty of its neighbour Morocco. The two are separated by a six metre high fence. The enclave's low tax, low duty regime has made it the economic hub of the region. Business here is all about trade. Goods imported into Malea from Asia and elsewhere can often be sold at a higher price across the border in Morocco. But these exports have to be transported and that means heavy lifting, as Linda Presley found out when she went to meet some of the porters.
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It's an assault on the senses. A deafening cacophony of voices carried on the breeze through a cloud of dust the colour of rusty nails. There are bundles as far as the eye can see, massive bales of stuff, all of them wrapped in cardboard, cloth or sacking and tied with rope and tape. Second hand clothes, bed sheets and blankets, bolts of fabric, a dizzying range of household items. These are goods destined for markets in Morocco and beyond. And under the bales, bent double with the weight of their loads, there are women. Moroccan women, thousands of them. This is what commerce looks like on one of Europe's most southerly frontiers. Welcome to Barrio Chino, Melilla's border crossing to Morocco. For pedestrians only, who just happen to be hauling merchandise that may weigh more than they do. But as long as the porters can carry it, it's classed as personal luggage. So Morocco lets it in duty free. Some people call it smuggling, but in Melilla it's known as atypical trading. In any case, it's worth hundreds of millions of euros to the economy of this Spanish enclave. At first, it isn't easy to get any of the women porters to stop and talk. They're all intent on claiming a place in the queue. Some of them will journey back and forth three or four times, but there's a limited window because the gates only open from 8 until midday. It's the time pressure that accounts for the pervading atmosphere of semi hysteria. Once Latifa's got her cue position, she drops her bundle, 60 kilos of used clothing and is happy to chat. She looks up from beneath a leopard skin baseball cap pulled low over her hijab and tells me she'll be paid €3 for taking this load across to Morocco. Latif has been working here for 24 years. I ask her why she does it. She can't quite believe my naivety. Because I have a family and they need to eat, she says. Latifah's the breadwinner at home. Her husband beat her, so she left him. And then there's a great buffeting from behind as the queue surges forward. Latifah loses interest in our conversation and returns to the job at hand, pushing her bundle forward and cursing someone who edges in front of her. I get out of the way as she's made invisible by the heaving crowd and its cargo. No wonder these women are known as the mule women of Melilla. Hasna's looking disgruntled, arms folded, leaning against one of the barriers. Although portering here in Melilla is traditionally work for women, increasingly they face competition from unemployed Moroccan men. Hasna points to a whole mob of thrusting young guys loaded up, their necks craning to see if the queue is moving. The men are taking our places, she says sulkily. Hasna has one child and she's the only porter I meet who still has a husband, although he's disabled by lung disease. Hasna's six months pregnant, but she still intends to do a trip later, when things get even rowdier. I see her sitting on the ground, her jalaba, now the same colour as the earth. It's impossible to stay clean here. Sitting next to her is a woman with her arm in a sling. I see two women, both walking with the help of crutches, and there are dozens who must be over 60. Aziz, one of Malia's traders, is standing away from the fray. He watches as his merchandise literally staggers towards Morocco. Aziz employs around 50 women porters every day and shifts a container load of used clothing. I tell him that as an outsider, it's shocking to see what's going on here. I ask him if he feels guilty about employing women in these conditions. He says yes, he feels bad, but the responsibility for the way the trading works lies with Morocco. But hang on a minute, I say. It's yous paying the women? I pay well, he says. €10 a trip. I ask Aziz what kind of profit he makes. No puerto saber. I don't know, he says, laughing. In the summer months, it's not uncommon for women to be hospitalised from heat exhaustion. One of them was crushed to death. But it's also true that without this work, thousands of women and their families wouldn't eat. It's Just such an extraordinary thing to see on a European border in the 21st century.
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Linda Presley in Malea the exploitation of valuable natural resources has long been top of many agendas in the islands of the Pacific Ocean. Ever since the region was explored and mapped by Captain Cook and other navigators in the late 18th century, its raw material have been coveted by the outside world. Until well into the 20th century, there was an assumption that supplies were inexhaustible. Some whale species, for example, were hunted to the verge of extinction before a ban on commercial whaling was put in place in 1982. Today, as John Pickford's been finding out, powerful outside interests continue to play a role on both sides of the debate. He begins this dispatch in the Kingdom of Tonga in Polynesia.
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It was a languid Tongan Sunday morning and I was on a ferry crossing the lagoon from the country's capital, Nukolofa, to the small resort island of Pangimotu just off the palm fringe shore. A strange vessel appeared among the anchored yachts. It was painted battleship grey with wing like stabilisers on each side. From every angle it flashed speed and power and emblazoned on its hull were two iconic words. Brigitte Bardot. It was, I learned, the ultra fast scout ship for Sea shepherd, an environmental pressure group that takes direct action in pursuit of its goals. The French film star is a loyal supporter. One of its prime targets has been Japan's whaling fleet. In spite of the international ban on killing whales, Japan still hunts a limited number for it says scientific research. On Pangimoto, I joined a group of expatriates at a beachside table. Bardot was quite a talking point, but one woman said little and looked uneasy. She's from the Japanese embassy, an American confided to me. She supports whaling. The next day in Nukolofa, I met two of Bardot's crew loading crates of beer into an inflatable. They'd soon be leaving Tonga, they said, for the Southern Ocean. And they gave a graphic account of what disrupting whalers at sea can involve. Once Bardot locates the Japanese fleet, more robust Sea shepherd vessels approach the bigger ships, then try to impede the refuelling of the whalers. The Japanese respond with water cannon and non lethal concussion grenades. As I listened to these young activists, I thought back to Sunday lunch on Pangimotu and the Japanese lady's nervous smile. Tricky waters to steer a safe passage through. An appeal court in the United States has described Sea Shepherd's tactics as piracy. While a verdict is pending in a case brought by Australia in the International Court of Justice, arguing that Japan's claim to be hunting whales for science is spurious. The Bardot at anchor of Pangimotu is in a long tradition. I thought afterwards you could write the history of the Pacific as a succession of arrivals of powerful foreign vessels in palm fringe lagoons, beginning with Captain Cook's ship Endeavour off Tahiti in 1769. Later in my travels on remote Kiritimati, or Christmas Island, Cook got there on Christmas Eve 1777. The appearance of another foreign ship brought some of that history right up to date. I just arrived and was gazing at the ocean from the island's only hotel, thinking over a wealth of first impressions. The giant dragonflies at the airport, the hubbub in the dilapidated terminal, including the surprise of Spanish voices. A sense of the whole island had been energized by something. Then lavender from reception appeared. Would I like a trip to the wharf in the hotel's truck to collect some ice? The wharf is busy, thronging with people. We get the ice. The truck lumbers back along dirt roads close to the sea. We stop again outside a small house and there in the yard is a beautiful freshly caught yellowfin tuna. So that's why they needed the ice. As one of two guests in the Captain Cook Hotel, I would feast on that fish for the rest of the week. Suddenly, the hull of a big ship looms like a black shadow between the coconut palms. Is that where the ice came from? I ask our driver. Yes. Is it a cargo ship? No. Spanish pursena, he says. And it all clicks into place. Christmas island in mid Pacific has become a logistics base for Spanish purse seine fishing vessels. The shipping agent is one of the island's richest men. Purse seiners with nets miles across are scooping vast quantities of tuna from the ocean each year. The sale of fishing licenses to dozens of countries, not just Spain, is a major source of income for Pacific governments. But there are fears that tuna stocks today are being viewed as whaling was in the past as a limitless bonanza with the collapse of the fishery, a catastrophe waiting to happen. It was an astonishing juxtaposition that I viewed from that truck, the single locally caught tuna in its box of ice and the Spanish ship just offshore with a capacity for thousands. And I was sharing the ride with a group of low paid islanders, laughing, singing and oblivious of the contrast I was feeling between the power in that ship and their weakness. The history of the Pacific, some might say since 1769.
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And that was John Pickford. Now the countries of eastern Europe have rarely been noted for their jollity. Before the October Revolution of 1918 and right on through the decades of the Cold War, there was a common stereotype abroad that Russians in particular were morose, gloomy and resolutely unamused by the antics of visiting Westerners. Perhaps it wasn't surprising. Soviet citizens were reg told that behind the superficial, deceptive American smile was an imperialist wolf revealing its ferocious teeth. So as the Communist era ended in Russia, foreign businesses had to work hard to retrain staff who'd been brought up to consider service with a smile, something servile, even sinister. But Jamie Kumarasamy's recently been back, not in the ussr, but in today's Russian Federation, and he was surprised to find that the frosty demeanour of decades past appears to be starting to crack.
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You didn't see too many smiles in the Soviet Union, at least. I didn't when I first visited the country 30 years ago. What I did see, and what I can still remember vividly, are rows of sour faces glumly gliding up and down the escalators in the grandiose surroundings of the Moscow Metro. And what I can still hear, are the terse instructions of our ashen faced guide, Svetlana, a woman of indeterminate age, but with a very precise view of punctuality. We meet for breakfast at 8 o' clock sharp, she would volunteer at the end of a hard day's sightseeing. Then we leave for museum at nine o' clock sharp. But long before I'd encountered Svetlana's pointed instructions, the tone had been set by the first Russian official I'd encountered, a female border guard, one of the unspeaking, unsmiling women in dark green uniforms, frostily hiding their humanity under several layers of make up as they surveyed foreign passports from behind their booths. Over time, as I came to know the country and eventually to live in it for several years, I saw beyond the chilly cliche of the humorless Russians. Not only do the Russians love their children, as the singer Sting once pondered, but they love their clowns, their gentle TV humorists, and their wonderfully satirical and absurdist writers, such as Nikolai Gogol or Daniel Khams. In the comfort of their homes, laughs flow as freely as the vodka, which often helps to produce them. Yet as Russia changed and opened up, losing many of its Soviet hang ups, the border guards never lost their icy aloofness. A friend once claimed to have seduced the lady in green, but his boast was greeted with universal scepticism. Melting a border guard's heart seemed as plausible as a tryst with a supermodel. But something strange happened on a recent visit to Russia. As I approached the border guard's booth at Moscow's Domodiedova airport, I was greeted with a smile, not a scowl, and a polite request from the guard for me to remove my glasses so she could compare the squinting face in the passport photo with to the slightly puzzled one in front of her. Our encounter ended with a friendly das vidana. As I headed off to catch my connecting flight, I tried to process what had just happened. Had I stumbled upon the one friendly border guard? Had there been an enforced period at charm school? Or were smiles simply more common in Russia these days? When I reached my destination, the Ural city of Yekaterinburg, I thought I'd test how far things had changed. As I walked down the street, I did something I had stopped doing in Russia over the years smiling at people coming the other way. In the past, the recipient of a cheery gaze would have stared blankly or looked away, but now they were greeting grin with grin. I asked my Russian travelling companion, Dina, whether I was imagining things, but she had made a similar observation. So where had the smiles sprung from? Well, perhaps Russians travel abroad these days and see that public merriment is pretty common. Or perhaps as you look around an attractive looking, clean city, there is simply more to smile about. But even in the more sour faced Soviet days, you'd encounter humor where you least expected it. Remember our tour guide Svetlana, the one who made a point of reminding us that every rendezvous was at such and such a clock sharp? Well, on the penultimate day of our trip, her instructions took an unexpected turn to morrow morning. We shall meet at 10 o', clock, she announced. An anticipatory silence descended on the coach as we waited for the inevitable word sharp to come hissing towards us threateningly. But it didn't. We exchanged puzzled glances before one of the braver members of the group raised his hand to ask the obvious cheeky question. Don't you mean ten o' clock sharp? After the briefest of pauses, she shot back with the timing and deadpan delivery of a seasoned stand up. No, you may be two or three seconds late and that's it.
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Jamie Kumarasamy, finding the Russians a little more welcoming and bringing this edition to a close. More next week on both Thursday and Saturday mornings. Until then, goodbye.