← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Dec 11, 2010
00:28:16
Can America's dollars buy hearts and minds in southern Afghanistan? It's a subject has...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent. You can hear the edition of the programme broadcast on the BBC World Service and presented by Alan Johnston by going to the World Service web pages and to those of from our own correspondent. But now, here's the Radio 4 edition
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and it's presented by Kate Ady. Today, the US pours dollars into Afghanistan. As the Taliban prepare to take a winter break from battle, the official Middle east peace process stalls. But on the ground, Jews and Arabs forge connections across their deep divide. We eavesdrop on an argument over the use of English in India and witness a struggle to the death between man and beast. In the fields of eastern France, there's been more violence in Afghanistan. A large explosion near police headquarters in the city of Kandahar this morning has left a number of casualties. And late yesterday, a roadside bomb in the south of the country killed 15 people, all civilians, some of them children. The victims were travelling in a truck in Helmand province when the bomb, said to have been planted by the Taliban, went off. It may have been meant for an American patrol. As winter descends upon Afghanistan, the military is expecting the Taliban to withdraw their fighters to regroup and plan their Future campaign. The BBC's Michael Buchanan, who's just back from Helmand, says for the Americans, it's a time to try to extend their influence in the area.
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If you visit a country for the first time, as was the case with my recent trip to Afghanistan, then discerning what is normal can be difficult. You can read up in advance about cultures and mannerisms and behaviours, but it's only when you experience somewhere that it all makes sense. One personal definition of normal that has served me well is the concept of the whingeing farmer. In my experience, no matter where you go in the world, speak to a farmer and within minutes they will invariably start complaining. So I took it as a sign of normality that I met a farmer in Marger who moaned long and bitterly about his struggles. He was sitting on a rock in a small bazaar, watching a blacksmith repair his tools, a small pick and an axe. No matter what I asked him, he always reverted to talking about the cost of diesel, the difficulties of getting water to his land and the low price he was getting for his wheat. Finally, he answered one of my questions. Security, he said, has improved, but what's the point if you cannot feed yourself? Marja is certainly safer than it was in the spring and summer when U.S. marines fought a fierce insurgency. For several months in recent weeks, however, the Main population centres in this dusty, sandy, arid district have become quieter through a combination of American military might and the Taliban's annual winter retreat from battle. The calm has given the Americans the opportunity to focus on winning over the locals, to try and ensure that should the insurgents return in force in the spring, they will find a wholly altered physical and psychological landscape. The residents of Marja, mainly impoverished, illiterate wheat, cotton and poppy growers, have not yet decided which way to turn. Daoud, one of the few English speakers in the area, told me that some of the thousands of families who left the district earlier this year ahead of the American incursion are slowly returning and that life is very much on the up, further along from him, on the same side of the market as the spade seller and the solar panel store. And a group of men told me that business was indeed good in the central areas, but they feared for their lives every day they went home as there were regular shootings in their village. A different perspective came from a group of young men who stood by the side of the main road and told me over the splutter of the odd motorcycle that there were no longer Taliban in the area, only angels moving swiftly among them. A quick smile and a wink suggested their sympathies were leaning towards the insurgents. Into that debate, the United States is pouring vast amounts of money into Marja. Lt. Col. Kyle Ellison, the charismatic, quick smiling Marine in charge of securing southern Marja, says a rebuilding surge is needed to match the military surge. Lt. Col. Ellison is doing his own bit to improve relations. In the days before I met him, he'd been walking the district trying to find out how much one single cow or sheep were worth, as he sought to pay the appropriate level of compensation to farmers whose livestock had been killed in firefights. Far more money is being spent in the Kuru Chera settlement, where the local farmers hold a small market at the junction of a couple of dirt roads. In the past five months, $2 million has been spent on reconstruction projects for the 14,000 people who live in the district. The Americans are not bothered about the cost. One told me the money was far more effective than dropping a couple of million dollar missiles. Whether the largesse will prove effective in the long term is far from clear. At one project financed by the us, the building of a boys school, I met Abdul, who was working as a day labourer, leaning against the back of a pickup truck, drinking tea. He told me he had previously worked on a project to clean the local irrigation channels for which he was paid a daily wage. Of seven hundred Pakistani rupees, he was now earning five hundred rupees building the school. At seven hundred rupees. He said it was worth his while working with the west, providing the Taliban don't find out, in which case he could be killed. But at 500 rupees, it might well be more profitable to go back to growing poppies. And as the Taliban commanders in his village were encouraging everyone to do, the difference in Abdul's earnings is approximately £1.20 per day. But on such small differences, could Marge's future turn?
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And that was Michael Buchanan, the American Secretary of State. Hillary Clinton has said that the Obama administration will work on to try to narrow differences between Israel and the Palestinians. But she said the United States could not impose a peace settlement. The two sides had to achieve this. In a speech in Washington, she expressed frustration at recent setbacks, namely the abandonment of efforts to persuade Israel to stop building new Jewish settlements, something which the Palestinians are insisting on. Hugh Sykes, who's just back from the Middle east, says that while a formal peace process may have stalled, you can see signs of hope if you look hard enough.
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At a demonstration I went to last week against evictions of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem, which is not only occupied by Israel, but annexed by them, there were more Jews chanting and holding up banners in support of the Palestinians than Arabs. The banners were in Hebrew and in English. That's a change. I remember going to an anti occupation demonstration by a variety of peace activists in Tel Aviv a few years ago, and they had slogans entirely in Hebrew, which meant I had to clumsily ask a number of people what their posters meant. I wondered why some of them weren't in a more international language like English. Ah, said one of the demonstrators, I suppose you have a point. Then I asked her, who do you think you're actually talking to at demos like these? After a long pause, she said, that's a very good question. I think we're just talking to ourselves. That's changed too. There's much more contact now between Jews and Arabs who feel the same way about the occupation, and a lot of it is under the radar, so to speak. Barely reported. We are successful, said Raider, a Palestinian teacher. And that's why the government don't like us. Raida teaches English and history to a class of 11 year olds. She looked round the room at the children gathered at small tables. Two Jews at that table, one Arab, she told me. Three Arabs, two Jews over there and in the corner, two Jews and two Arabs. The school is in Wakdat Al Salam, Nevi Shalom, a oasis of peace, a village where Arabs and Jews have lived together willingly as neighbors since it was established in 1970. But the children are spontaneously, genuinely mixing. Are they? I asked. Yes, absolutely. Ryder insisted. They play together, they visit each other's homes, they go to the cinema together. They're friends. The day I visited, the children were making kites in honour of their special guest, the British author of numerous books for young people, Michael Morpurgo. He's just written a children's book about the Arab Israeli conflict. It's a heartening story of a Palestinian boy who lets kites fly free over the concrete wall around an Israeli settlement with Salaam written on them. Peace. When the wind changes, the kites come flying back with Shalom written on them by the settlement. Children. Peace. Michael Morpogo believes peace can only come from young Jews and young Arabs living together late, learning together and showing respect to each other. It's not going to start from the other end, he told me. We've seen that. Meaning it'll never come from the top. But does the children's experience at Nevi Shalom, Wakhdat al Salaam, Oasis of Peace endure? Raider, the teacher said, yes, absolutely it does. It's rooted in them. After 11 years in an enlightened community like this, she tells a revealing story about one of her Jewish students going on to secondary school and daring to challenge the teacher who was telling the class there was nobody living in what's now Israel when the state was created in 1948. If a Jewish child can stand up to an inaccurate teacher like that in a Jewish school. Ryder smiled. There is some hope. Rami and Maazen believe in hope as well. They also visit schools in Israel and in the occupied territories. Their message is that violence will never solve the conflict. They're very persuasive. Rami is a Jew, Mazen is a Palestinian Arabic, and they know what violence is. Maazen's 62 year old father was shot dead by an Israeli soldier. Rami's 14 year old daughter was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber on a bus in Jerusalem. Rami and Mazen are now close friends. They call each other brother. They're members of the Parents Circle and Families Forum. It is not a psychological support group. It's a campaigning organization with a very precise objective which is written on their smart business cards. Bereaved families supporting peace, reconciliation and tolerance. Initiatives like these are essential baby steps, Hind Kabawat told me Hind is A Syrian lawyer who specialises in conflict resolution. In her fabulous spacious stone Damascus house, with a fountain in the courtyard and elaborately painted high ceilings, she proudly pointed to the the most important books on my shelf the Bible, the Koran and the sayings of Mahatma Gandhi. Does she believe that Israel and the Palestinians are reconcilable? Does she believe, especially now with talk of attacks on nuclear sites, that Israel and Iran can negotiate? Of course, she said, in Ireland, peace only came after the British negotiated with the ira. Then she added, look at Europe. Millions of people died there in the Second World War. Millions. Did your parents or mine ever believe there'd be peace in Europe? She asked. Well, there is, she went on, because they did believe in it. We have to have hope.
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Hugh Sykes, back now from the Middle East. The murder of a tourist visiting Cape Town has done nothing to help South Africa banish a reputation for violent crime. Police there have been told that Annie Diwani, a 28 year old Swedish woman on honeymoon with her British husband, was killed after their tax was attacked during a late night drive through the township of Guguletu. Karen Allen's been to Gugulhetu and says while its residents acknowledge the township has a serious crime problem, they're keen to show there's another side to their community.
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You don't see many foreign tourists in Guguletu these days. Virtually the only white faces you see are those of journalists trying to make sense of this confusing place. All the world has heard of the terrible things that can go on here, but that just isn't the whole story. There are many who have pride in this troubled place. More often than not, there's real warmth shown to visitors in sweltering heat. Our car has broken down. We grind to a halt at a busy intersection. There are shacks to the left of us and the ubiquitous white taxi buses ambling past us on the right. Fortunately, it's daylight. Township code dictates that criminals rarely strike during the day here for fear of being lynched by the community. But at night, few people walk the streets and even the toughest here will tell you Googs, as they call it, is just not safe in this country, where everything is defined by the colour of your skin. The image of my white cameraman pounding frantically on the wind of a bus alongside us must have seemed bizarre. Often here, the rapping of knuckles on a car window is the first move in a vehicle carjacking. But of course, my colleague simply wants a lift so he can summon help for his car. The driver of the Bus proves to be an affable man with an easy smile called Ernest. And within minutes, he's helped us get our car back on the road. In the white suburbs of South Africa, people fear strangers. Here, it seems the vast majority of people welcome them. We leave behind a trail of waving hands and kind words from the crowd that's gathered beside us. They urge us to return to Goog's when we've got more time. Like many township residents across South Africa, people in Guguletu feel their neighbourhood is misunderstood. They say outsiders frequently betray their ignorance of what everyday life is like here. In the post apartheid era, many people have chosen to stay on in the townships. Life feels more real here, they tell me. Lele, a young businessman, shows us around. He points to a row of brightly coloured houses where the posh folk of Guguletu live. Absent are the high walls and the barbed wire fences that characterise the affluent and more nervous parts of South Africa. And he tells me people know their neighbours here. That's more than I can say about where I live in Johannesburg. These are properties which wouldn't look out of place in any smart urban suburb. But not so far away. There are ramshackle shacks, too. Guguletu, like other townships, is a real social melting pot. Professional people live alongside the unemployed. Gangsters and preachers rub along side by side, and they all worry about crime. Lele says the last time an outsider was killed here was back in 1993. The recent tourist killing, he adds, has left an ugly stain on this proud community. I go to sample opinion in a lively restaurant called Nzoli's. Here, people come to feast on thick chunks of barbecued meat served on enormous metal plates. In the corner are a group of musicians, loudly improvising and singing. They've just dropped in from a practice session at Volcano's rehearsal rooms down the road. Volcano, despite its name, is a quietly spoken Rastafarian who, like many here, is trying to do something positive for his community. He's opened his backyard to provide a meeting place for the young people of Guguletu, to try to divert them away from crime. Storming into Volcano's rehearsal rooms comes Kritsi, brash, confident and cool. He's heard the BBC is in town and he wants to have a word. With his sunglasses clamped firmly onto his face, he grabs a microphone and begins to rap. His song is an ironic one, all about the township. Afterwards, I talk to him about his neighbourhood. He's proud of it, yet he's also realistic about life on the streets here where some one in five people, many of them young, are unemployed and easily tempted into a life of crime. He tells me it costs 100 rand, about 10 pounds, to kill someone. The crime statistics in Guguletu are staggering. There have been 700 murders here in the past five years, but many of them happened behind closed doors. They were domestic crimes, not attacks on strangers. And this is clearly a community some sensitive about airing its dirty washing in public. A week later, I'm back in Guguletti Township and I bump into one of Kritzi's mates. He welcomes me with a broad smile. So we didn't scare you off, my sister? He beams broadly. No, I reply. Not at all.
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That's Karen Allen. In South Africa, the Indians may have bid farewell to their British colonial masters more than six decades ago, but the English language they left behind them shows no sign of leaving. 90 million Indians speak English, most as their second or even third language, and depending on where they're speaking it, there's a wide range of dialects and of accents. Peter Curran learned that its continued usage can be a controversial topic when he was invited to Chennai, formerly Madras, to help judge a debating competition for Indian school children.
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Sitting there at the side door of the lecture theatre was a racist monkey education for all? Well, not quite. This is the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Madras, a university in the midst of a city, yet with deer, snakes and monkeys moving freely around the sprawling campus. Huge banyan trees rise up between low concrete buildings, slowly overwhelming man's puny attempt to impose himself on this fecund landscape. At Chennai airport, rather than use trucks to pull luggage trailers around, they deploy big wheeled farm tracks, as if believing tractors will always be needed for the perpetual business of working the land. If this flying lark turns out to be just a passing fad. One of my fellow judges is the university's director, Professor Anath. A tall symphony of green cotton and graceful moves, he gives me a small book detailing the flora and fauna of the college he has taught at for nearly 40 years. A student filled car passes us, horn blaring. Touching his own distinguished hooter, he confides, we have four and a half thousand students and many other creatures here. It's a place of ecological dynamism. We walk into the main lecture hall as the young debaters marshal their thoughts, having witnessed the first session. Sunipa Dev goes to school in Kolkata and loves maths. She says she dreams of making it through to the Indian Statistical Institute for for her career. I ask her about the difference between this and normal school debating. This is a shock, she says. We usually stand up and make our speeches and sit down. The debates are a bit like elocution exercises. Here we get to argue and test our ideas and have our minds changed by people our own age, not teachers. Today's motion, the importance of learning English in India is overstated, is ripe for nuanced debate. There are 22 constitutionally recognized languages in India, and the debaters portray English as either the smouldering dog end of colonialism or the passport to economic growth, as evidenced by the IT and service industry explosion. But there are unexpected angles. One team highlights the need for English to liberate Dalits, the Indian underclasses, formerly untouchables who could use English to vault over the social barriers of the officially banned caste system. The pressure on rural teachers not equipped to teach English to a sufficient standard is highlighted. The disastrous attempt to enforce Hindi as the national language of India in 1965 is cited as a reason why English could be the language of Indian unity. Some complained that that as doctors were trained in English, they would either go abroad or into cities rather than struggle with local languages, thus denying some areas decent medical care. After lively interventions from the floor, we run from the hall through a thunderstorm into minivans and on to lunch. Every inch of the interior of our minibus is lined with highly varnished pale wood panels, carved scrolls and brass handles. In other words, if you turned this van inside out, it would resemble a giant coffin, perhaps a witty acknowledgement of the perils of traveling on the roads of Chennai. Even here, amid the pinballing cars, trucks and bikes, English is not used as a blunt instrument. Whereas in the UK the phrase speed kills is a familiar sight on road signs in Chennai, official signs read speed thrills or but kills, rhyme and reason. Back for the afternoon session, I meet Mr. Srinivas, a teacher who has brought four boys from the army school Ramakrishnapuram in Hyderabad. He is quiet and watchful as his excited pupils ricochet ideas around the room with another school. After their debate, Mr. Srinivas father died when he was a toddler and his mother was illiterate, so his induction into a mission school and particularly joining its library was life changing. He says with a smile that he couldn't learn to read English quickly enough to understand the big science books that he cradled in wonder. But his older sister tried to bring him closer to Einstein via the Jane Austen novels she read to him at home by tallow light. As a successful science teacher, what does he feel about the English language debate. He leans forward, conscious of young ears nearby, and says, I love the English language. And, you know, we don't actually lose anything of ourselves by using it, because although we might speak in English, we think in our native tongues.
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And that was Peter Curran, now a statistic you may well be unaware of. There are reckoned to be five times as many wild boar in France today as there were 20 years ago. Last year, hunters in France killed a staggering half a million of the animals. Yet these are adaptable, tough and determined beasts, and their number just keeps on growing. One region with a particular problem is Alsace, along the German border. Hugh Schofield has been out with a local hunt not far from the river Rhine.
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The river Rhine at Erstein is disappointing. There's a tourist panel with a poster showing how it used to look in the 19th century. Beautiful islands everywhere and sandbanks and meandering side branches. Now it's all been tamed into one vast channel with barrages and massive locks for the shipping. No romance at all, unless you're a barge spotter. The land side isn't much better either. The Alsace plain is gradually filling up with spillover from Strasbourg. Erstein used to be a small village whose only claim to fame was a ruined monastery and a visit from de Gaulle on Christmas Day 1944. Now, like everywhere else around here, it's splurging into the surrounding countryside with new out of town stores, car wash joints and do it yourself centres. The fields are shrinking. Yet somehow, caught between the river and this creeping suburbanization, the wild boar of Alsace have never been so prolific. Today there are so many wild boar that last year hunters in the single department of the Barrans or Lower Rhine shot more than 20,000. A few years ago, they were getting one sixth of that. This was all explained to me by one Pascal Perotte Doridon, who for the last 25 years has worked as a claims assessor for the local Wild Boar Crop Damage Compensation Scheme. The boar live in pockets of woodland, but they come out at night and cause devastation in the surrounding fields. What boar particularly like is maize, and luckily for them, over the last couple of decades, maize has also become the crop of choice in Alsace. Thanks to EU subsidies and a booming market, farmers have replaced other plants with acre after acre of the tall cob bearing cereal. Pascal drove me to see one damaged field. The boar had got in and a good quarter of the maize was trampled to the ground. The cobs had been ripped from the stems and gnawed to the husk. Pascal has done his assessing job for so long that he can tell bore damage from the depredations of badgers or deer. They nibble the cobs in a different way. It matters because the farmers only get compensated for for what the boar do not other animals. On the drive back, Pascal took calls on his mobile phone from another disgruntled farmer. In this part of France, the older people still speak German, or at least Alsacien, the local dialect. On the phone, the farmer was speaking French with a thick German accent and you could hear him struggling for the right French words. In the war, Alsace was incorporated into Germany and young men were conscripted into Hitler's army. That's never been forgotten. Today, people are happy to be living in France, but they don't really consider themselves French. They call France l', interieu, the interior. What lies over to the west across the Vosges mountains. On a wintry dawn, I joined a group of German speaking French for the Saturday hunt in woods banking on the river Rhine. Some were rough hewn locals, others well off types from Strasbourg or Maloos. They wore orange dayglo jackets for safety. The boar are colourblind, so it doesn't matter. First of all, the instructions. You don't shoot mature females. They may be carrying litters. And there have been disturbing scenes when pregnant sheep eggs have been gutted and well, they spilled their unborn offspring. That is not hunting etiquette. I am with Francois, a relaxed, cigar smoking insurance agent in his 60s who says he's killed more than 500 wild boar in his time. We take up position in the middle of the wood. It's not dense so there's a reasonable view. But the rifle bullets can kill at a distance of a mile, so you only aim when the target is quite close. The beaters pass by, hollering and waving sticks and accompanied by two wire haired dachshunds with bells around their neck and that sound like sleigh bells. It's a long cold wait, but after half an hour I sense the silence has been disturbed. Something is moving nearby. Francois has his rifle to his shoulder. I see a dark shape running through the undergrowth. Three, four shots and we see the beast go down. It is a massive 200 pound male, what they call here in the German dialect a Kyler. He has long tusks curling from the side of his mouth and he champs them slowly as he dies, his last breaths frosting in the cold air.
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And on that very final note from Hugh Scofield in the east of France, we've reached the end of another edition. I'll be here again next week with more from our own correspondence around the world. Do join us. Goodbye.