← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Dec 06: Spies are Everywhere
00:27:35
Reporters tell their stories: in this edition, Carrie Gracie travels to China's most -...
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Mike Wendling
Thank you for downloading the latest edition
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BBC Correspondent
of BBC Radios from our own correspondent, the best in news and current affairs storytelling.
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Kate Ady
It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Narrator/Presenter
Hello. Today, nighttime in China's most troubled region. Spies are everywhere and the checkpoints are expecting us. Bows and arrows and magic amulets join the fight against Boko Haram in Nigeria. Is it offensive and racist or just a harmless tradition? The Washington Redskins are told, time to change that name. And in Poland, music, theatre, storytelling, a Jewish festival, but in a town where there are no Jews. But first, a day of silence. That, apparently is what's been agreed for next Tuesday by both sides involved in the fighting in eastern Ukraine. Yesterday's unexpected ceasefire announcement from Kiev offers a glimmer of hope that the bitter conflict might, after eight months, finally be nearing an end. The Tuesday truce is the latest in a series of deals announced during the war. The others were all broken within days, hours sometimes, by both the pro Russian rebels and government forces. Fergal Keen, just back from Ukraine, has been looking at the circumstances which led to one of Europe's bloodiest conflicts in decades.
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Kate Ady
It was a warm morning and sunny, but already the omens were bad. A burned out army truck was smouldering on the side of the road. A Ukrainian jet made several passes overhead, and constant as the passing minutes, the booming malevolence of the guns. On that autumn morning three months ago, the eastern battlegrounds of Ukraine were supposed to be experiencing a ceasefire. But death was still falling from the skies on the positions of the rival armies, on the long highway that runs beside the Sea of Azov, on the villages, towns and farms of the Donbass, on Lebedinskoye, where Lubov Vasilyevna was taking care of her grandchildren, Nikita and Karolina. Karolina was age 6, a bright child who acted, in her grandmother's words, like a little mother. For Nikita, age 12, he was severely disabled, unable to feed himself properly or to speak fluently. When the shells began to fall, Lubov saw the children become terrified. Her immediate thought was to run with them from the farmhouse to a neighbour who had a basement shelter. She sat Nikita in his wheelchair, took Carolina by the hand and they set off amid the thunderous noise of explosions. But they were caught where nobody wants to be, under artillery fire, out in the open, less than a hundred meters from their home, a shell landed. The blast threw Lubov to the ground. Her ears ringing, her body feeling spasms of pain. She looked up and saw the bloodied children. Carolina was dead already. Nikita slumped in the wheelchair, badly wounded. He died later that day. Returning to the scene this week, I saw some of the huge lumps of jagged metal that flew through the air that day. And though familiar with the murderous force of steel and high explosive, the thought of those young bodies being ripped asunder filled me with rage. This is where we've come to in Europe. A war big enough to kill more than 4,000 people, small enough to be allowed to freeze and be forgotten because our international system is so broken and polarized, nobody can agree how to stop it. The village in which the children lived lies between Ukrainian and rebel lines. In Soviet times it was the site of a kolkhoz, a collective farm, but that was sold off, its assets stripped by the new men on the make of the post Soviet world. Opposite the village playground, frequented often by Nikita and Carolina, is a memorial to the dead of World War II, the Great Patriotic War. There are carved images of soldiers and their loved ones saying goodbye and a portrait of a sorrowful shoaled mother. History has hammered Lebedinskoia. In modern times it has endured Stalin and famine, the Nazis, the Cold War, the collapse of communism, the rise of the oligarchs and rampant state corruption. And now a new war created out of a malign tangle of circumstances. The West's failure to see how its projection of power to Russia's borders and support for anti Moscow politicians would be felt in the Kremlin. The poverty and alienation of a people abandoned by their government and the ruthless power politics of Vladimir Putin, who has seized on the post Iraq war crisis in international diplomacy as an alibi and an opportunity to impose his will on his neighbors. Three months after the death of her grandchildren, Lubov Vasilyevna is still being treated for her wounds. I met her in hospital and she showed me some photographs of Nikita and Karolina. They are images taken in a professional studio and the children are wearing their Sunday best. The little girl has an expression of seriousness, aware of the formality of the occasion. Nikita looks excited by the moment, a huge grin on his face. It is difficult. It's very difficult, Lubov tells me, because every day, day and night I see them in front of my eyes as though it were yesterday. And I go to bed at night and I think maybe it could have ended differently. My soul aches because I'll never see them again. They'll never say that they love me. I miss my grandchildren. And in such a manner is the pain of an old woman, measured not in minutes, hours or days, but in the lost lifetimes of her grandchildren.
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Narrator/Presenter
And that's Fergal Keen. China says it's facing a growing threat from militant Islam. It's in the midst of a year long crackdown on what it describes as terrorism driven by religious extremism. The campaigns focused on the western province of Xinjiang, home to China's Uyghur ethnic minority, who are predominantly Muslim. Despite claims from the authorities that they've put more than 100 terrorist gangs out of business, violent attacks have continued. Critics accuse China of exacerbating its problems there by religious and cultural repression. A close eye is kept on foreign journalists visiting the region, as Cary Gracie's been finding out on a trip to Kashgar, the westernmost city in China and the last stop before the Pakistan.
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BBC Correspondent
Our flight is late in. It snowed overnight, turning the Runway to ice. But an unforgiving winter is only the most ancient of Kashgar's challenges. This city is also the frontline in a tussle for 10 million Uyghur souls. You can see it even as you leave the airport. The soldiers in khaki with high tech bayonets look straight through us foreigners, through the Han Chinese passengers and through the old Uyghur women in shawls and fur coats. But young Uighur men, well, they're stopped and searched. We're met by our driver, called Army. Many Chinese born in Chair Mao's era have names that are martial or patriotic or ideological. Army is Han Chinese, but usefully he speaks Uyghur. As we climb into his 4x4, he passes over some flatbread the size of a dinner plate. We haven't had time for lunch. Eat it seated side towards you, he advises, or you'll offend the locals. We pull out into the traffic. On either side of the road stretches a leeched landscape under a leaden sky. The air is too dry for more than a light dusting of snow. Mud brick houses, empty fields, a solitary crow on a wire and cantering straight out of a childhood fairy tale. Hunched old men with tall hats and wispy beards on donkey carts. Army's phone keeps ringing. Sounds like it might be a girlfriend. I'm just about to mention that the BBC believes in two hands on the steering wheel when a checkpoint appears. A car full of Uighurs are having their papers inspected. The police officers then turn to us. Are we journalists? They ask. Where are we going? Army offers a plausible tale about places we want to film, plausible enough to get us our documents back, but not plausible enough to get us through the checkpoint, foreign reporters may not be a terrorist threat, but they can be a danger to the government's version of events. As we head back in the direction we came, army mutters that things must be bad to have the local police chief out at a checkpoint on a Sunday afternoon. Over barbequed lamb and sweet tea, we discuss our next move. Army seems to weigh the risks as earnestly as we do, claiming that if we don't get what we came for, he'll be embarrassed to take our money. We tour Kashgar, starting with the night market, where smoke is rising over the charcoal barbecues and steam over the vats of rice and mutton entrails. Hawkers sell cubes of fermented yogurt and labour over ice cream churns with wooden paddles. But I know enough not to ask sensitive questions in public, and army warns that spies are everywhere. So I talk food and hats, avoiding mention of the recent assassination. Just over the road at China's largest mosque, the imam stabbed to death on his way out of morning prayers. I don't talk about the riot police and the sniffer dogs at major junctions or the People's Square filling with heavily armoured vehicles. Ami's been giving us advice on where and what to film, and we're getting used to thinking he's on our side, but it turns out he's not. The next day, I learn that he's just a better class of spy. After a police ambush, the authorities reveal information about us that only army could have told them. That girlfriend on the phone, well, she was in fact a police handler. The security forces were being fully briefed on our every movement. Every checkpoint we were stopped at was expecting us. We get another driver. He too seems to know more about us than we've told him. And the next day we get stopped again by the police. We never reach our destination, but if life is about the journey, not the arriving, then so sometimes is reporting. Our trip bears fruit in other ways. I have many conversations with Uyghurs and with Han Chinese that illuminate the challenges on all sides. Our new driver gets lost on the way to the airport and we miss our flight back to Beijing. At least army was competent, even if he was working for the other side. Someday I'll go back to Kashgar and I'll ask army to tell me some true stories. Too bad I'll never know which to believe.
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Narrator/Presenter
Our China editor, Cary Gracie. In Xinjiang, a campaign to persuade the Washington Redskins American football team to change its name is gathering pace. Some native Americans reckon it's offensive and racist, many others agree. One leading US Newspaper has already dropped the Redskins bit. The New York Daily News says it's a throwback to a vanished era of perniciously casual racial attitudes. But many of the team supporters won't hear of a name change. They maintain the Redskins tag stands for respect and honour. Mike Wendling has been canvassing opinions at the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota.
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Mike Wendling
It was the fastest $50 I ever lost. Late at night, I wandered the smoke filled floor of the Sky Dancer Casino way up at the top of frozen flat, N.D. in a back room, a poker game was in full swing. Now I can mostly resist the dumbly flashing lights of slot machines, but given the chance to play cards, I'm all in. I gave my money to the cashier and got a stack of chips in return. As I sat down at the table, eight pairs of eyes looked me up and down. You might say the locals saw me coming in their leather jackets, baseball caps and jeans. They were friendly but businesslike. I didn't really get the chance to chat because within 15 minutes they had entirely cleaned me out. My chips all gone, I slunk away to the bar. The next day, I sheepishly recounted my losses over breakfast with Jordan Breen, the young Native American who was my guide around the reservation. Let me ask you this, he said. Were they all natives around the table? Yes, I guessed, Judging by skin color and by accent, the Native American one is just slightly different from the upper Midwest. Honk. That will be familiar to fans of the movie Fargo. Think of it this way, jordan said. You probably fed a family for a week. Some of those guys make a living like that. I guess that made me feel a little bit better. Jobs at the Sky Dancer Casino, whether they be fleecing, visiting poker players or, more conventionally, working behind the bar, are one of the few economic bright spots on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. If you arrive like I did after driving half a day along straight, paper flat roads, you you'll notice that those mountains aren't really mountains at all. It's a stretch to even call them hills. Still, any rise in the Great Plains landscape gives you a glorious panoramic view. This is Big sky country, almost exactly at the center of the North American continent. Jordan grew up here, and it almost killed him. Alcohol, drugs, wayward relatives, a broken home. He's 30, but in a hoodie he looks a lot younger. It's almost as if moving off the reservation took years off his life. He now has a musical career, a steady job, a wife and a child on the way. But something keeps drawing him back to Turtle Mountain. I think I find out what it is when we visit Jordan's old school. The kids greet him with high fives and confidential asides. Part pop star, part older brother, he's greeted warmly by Selly Jelleberg. The students call her Ms. J. She's a white teacher who's been working at the school for more than two decades. Ms. J points out the students she's most worried about. That one's been abandoned by his mother, she tells me. Over there. She shows up to school with bruises. That one there, he's a father. He's just turned 14. The obvious question is with all the problems on Turtle Mountain, does the name of an American football team in Washington 1500 miles away, really matter? The team's fans say the word Redskins means honor and respect and that it's a decades old tradition that unites their city. The team's owner says he'll never change it. Some argue that the row about the name is political correctness gone mad, or, as they might say around these parts, gone crazy. But political correctness is a strange thing, often a strawman for those who would prefer the comfort of old ways to the difficulty of changing their minds. Have you ever heard anyone say, I'm totally for political correctness or political correctness is great? No, it's a term almost always used in the negative. Just on the face of it, the name Redskin is barely defensible. Would you call someone from China a yellow skin? A Nigerian a black skin? The history of Native Americans is certainly a bleak one of depopulation, exile and brutality. I've been shown a newspaper advert from Minnesota dating from 1863. The state reward for dead Indians has been increased to $200 for every Redskin sent to purgatory. To underline the point, the advertiser this sum is more than the dead bodies of all the Indians east of the Red river are worth. One fan of the team who's open to changing the name tells me, if you don't think the word's offensive, next time you see a Native American go up to them and say, hey, Redskin, how's your day going? I can think of many things to call those poker players at the Sky Dancer Casino. Shrewd, maybe. Slightly richer, for sure. Right after dropping those $50, I could have sped out much worse. But Redskin? Somehow, I don't think so.
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Narrator/Presenter
Mike Wendling there and there'll be more on the Redskins controversy in crossing continents next Thursday morning here on Radio 4. The Nigerian military is said to have recaptured several towns in the northeast of the country which had earlier been seized by Boko Haram, but no one suggesting that the battle against the Islamic militants is being won. In the last few days, the groups carried out attacks in several locations, leaving many dead. In Adamawa State, the authorities have been seeking help in the battle against the insurgents from former soldiers and others, including hunters. Will Ross has been talking to some of them.
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Will Ross
It was a most unusual barbecue. Philip opened a small hole in the top of the sack and I peered inside. Hundreds of frogs. They were still alive, but not for long. They taste very sweet, said Philip, pulling one out and pushing it onto his enormous wooden skewer with a squelch. The frog kebabs were then smoked over a fire. Sharpening sticks, Gabriel was focused on another item on the market menu. I'm making traps, the hunter told me, for rats. I was in a village on the outskirts of Yolla to meet the men who are using their knowledge of the scrubland and forests to help with a very different kind of hunt for Boko haram jihadists. About 20 men in black uniforms turned up wielding machetes, wooden clubs, knives and ancient 2 meter long hunting rifles. They're some of the thousands of vigilantes trying to stop this part of the country falling into the hands of the Islamist extremists. Some looked like they could put up a tougher fight than others. Wearing thick glasses and deaf as a post, 68 year old, Aliyu is a retired soldier who fought in Nigeria's civil war in the 1960s. We were taken to the front line but we weren't told we were near the enemy. Then we reached a field and were told to lie down, he said before adding, we heard the gunshots getting closer and then suddenly we were ordered fire. Fire. Proud of his medals that glistened on his chest in the early morning sun, Aliyu is unlikely to be sent to fight the jihadists, but said he offers encouragement to the younger volunteers. Umar didn't need much of a pep talk to get him fired up. He'd just returned from the war front in the north of Adamaua state where he fought alongside Nigerian soldiers against Boko haram. I killed 10 of them, he boasted. Umar is a hunter but earns his living as a civil servant inspecting the cemeteries of Yola City. When I asked if he had any fear when fighting a well armed enemy, he sounded almost offended. I work amongst the graves so how can I be afraid of anyone? He said. His Weapons of choice include a bow and arrow, a knife, and even buffalo horns dipped in cobra poison. Not a man you want to upset in a hurry. Like many of the hunters, he wears leather bracelets or magical amulets on his arms and round his neck. People here are extremely grateful that these men have joined in the conflict and helped push back the jihadists, especially as there have been frequent reports of soldiers fleeing rather than fighting. The governor of the state, who helped mobilize the vigilantes, says their local knowledge is the key. Those fighting us are also part of the community. There's nothing on the enemy's forehead that says I'm an insurgent, Balaghilari told me. But the hunters know them and where they're located. They have the strategic intelligence that the regular army may not have. The governor then said, as well as fighting Boko Haram, there was a need to win the enemy over with good governance. I suggested. He touched on the root cause of Nigeria's woes, the politicians, many of whom do so little for the population and so much to stay in power and to stay rich. I expected a strong defence, but no, absolutely. We politicians must change our attitude. We can't continue to be selfish and so disconnected from the ordinary man who demands to know what we do with the funds entrusted to us, was the governor's somewhat surprising answer. I would advise us, the political class, to go and read about the history of revolutions, he said. We must change our ways. God has endowed Nigeria with sufficient resources, but we don't have enough for our greedy. I left his palatial home and headed to a camp on the other side of town, where thousands of traumatized people are now living. When Boko Haram attacked my daughter, my grandson and I ran for our lives into the bush. But we didn't have enough money to get away, so we had to work on a farm harvesting beans, said Zainab, who then witnessed another jihadist raid and eventually arrived in Yola just with the clothes she was wearing. The jihadists are attacking communities every day, but the politicians hardly talk about that as they're focused on imminent elections. No wonder I met so many people who have put their trust in the hunters and believe they really do have magical powers.
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Narrator/Presenter
That's Will Ross in North Eastern Nigeria. Now, why would a town with no Jewish residents at all stage a big Jewish festival every year? Well, for centuries, Poland was home to the largest Jewish community in the world. On the eve of the Second World War, there were more than 3 million Jews in Poland, 90% of whom were then killed in the Nazi extermination camps. Today, towns and cities across the country where those communities once thrived of rediscovering their history and celebrating it with exhibitions and festivals. This revival of interest has a personal significance for David Mazawa, who's just back from central Poland.
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David Mazawa
Of the 50,000 citizens of Kutno, not one is Jewish. Yet it staged perhaps the most impressive concert of Jewish music I've ever heard. The performers were all children from schools in the town, the youngest no more than six or seven. They belted out old hits in Yiddish and Hebrew with a fluency and stage presence that few adult performers could match. The concert was the finale of an ambitious festival of Jewish culture that the town has held since 1993. So why does it happen? The short answer is that my great grandfather was born there. There's a long answer too, but we'll come on to that. My great grandfather, Sholem Asch was born in Kutna in 1880 in A1 story wooden house teeming with children and a yard full of livestock that his father traded. He moved to Warsaw, then to Paris and New York, and became one of the most famous Jewish writers of the 1920s and 30s. He left Kutna far behind, but the Jewish community he grew up with, its beggars, traders, butchers, rabbis, prostitutes, and assorted schemers and dreamers. All of them found a kind of immortality in his stories and plays. That world was swept away in the Second World War. Kutner's experience was typical. In one day, the entire Jewish community, some 8,000 people, was, was marched at gunpoint to the grounds of a deserted factory at the edge of town. They spent two years in filthy, overcrowded conditions, with many dying of disease, hunger and cold, before being murdered in gas vans at Chelmner death camp. When the war ended, Kutna, like so many other towns and cities across Poland, essentially started over again, learning to function without its Jewish tailors and shoemakers, its lawyers and merchants. A town with a hole at its heart. Polish attitudes to the country's Jewish past are complex. There's plenty of lingering anti Semitism, a kind of theme park, nostalgia, pride in those Poles who saved Jews during the war, and guilt about those who collaborated, and all complicated by a sense that Poles themselves are victims of a turbulent history. But even that's not the whole story. Something else has emerged in the last 20 years. A growing number of Poles who feel profound loss about the Jewish nation that vanished from their midst. I came across some of them strolling in Warsaw's vast Jewish cemetery. They were buying brightly colored memorial lanterns to place on graves of people they had no personal connection with, but wanted to honour and remember. As I stood in front of the large mausoleum to Isaac Leib Peretz, a giant of Yiddish literature, I noticed a glamorous young couple peering at it. She had thigh high leather boots, bright red lipstick, an elegant cape. He had cheekbones to rival Rudolf Nureyev's, a natty silk scarf and a trendy beret. Do you know who's buried here? I asked. We're Polish, so of course we know all about Peretz, they said. We just can't read the Yiddish words on the tomb. That deep respect for a vanished culture that has also resulted in a world class museum that's just opened in the heart of Warsaw's former Jewish quarter. A beautiful shimmering glass structure, it tells the bittersweet story of the Jews long love affair with Poland with clear eyed honesty and real flair. Those same feelings of curiosity, loss and kinship led a handful of people in Kutna to start up a Jewish festival as Poland emerged from communism. In the early 1990s, as private cafes and general stores began to open up, the town announced its first Sholem Ash festival, a sign that Kuttner was looking west and engaging with European culture. The town has come a long way since then. Its new business park is attracting American, German and Chinese companies and provides jobs for 6,000 locals. The Sholemash festival has also come a long way. It includes a literary competition on a Jewish theme that attracts hundreds of entries from all over Poland. There's a local Jewish dance band, theatre performances and new translations of my great grandfather's works into Polish. Poland's rediscovery of its Jewish past started in Warsaw and Krakow, places where Jewish communities re emerged as the war ended. It's now spread far beyond the big cities and is growing year by year. It might not be a mass movement, but as Kutna shows, it's more than just a token effort. And in a world where bitter sectarian conflicts grab most of the headlines, a Jewish festival in a town with no Jews is surely something worth celebrating.
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Narrator/Presenter
And that was David Mazowa joining in those celebrations in the Polish town of Kutno. And don't forget, you can hear our correspondence stories anytime you like by downloading the programme podcast. But that's it for another week. Back next Saturday morning. Do join us. Goodbye.