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From Our Own Correspondent
Digging Up The Beer
00:28:02
Analysis, colour, wit and observation from journalists worldwide. Today: Pascale the...
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Hello from the. From our own correspondence studios at Broadcasting House in London, you've downloaded the latest
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edition of the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
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It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today, Spaniards furious at stories of top people on the take while they're being told to tighten their belts. Death comes to a young engineer who wanted to use his skills to build a new Syria. The Afghan governor who says, don't worry about the Taliban. The country's heading for peace. And happy days for the reporters in Timbuktu, too. They found the beer hidden away when Islamist fighters seized the city. There's mounting anger in Spain over a corruption scandal said to involve senior members of the ruling Popular Party, including the Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy. Yesterday, prosecutors questioned the party's former treasurer. Earlier, the Spanish stock market was badly shaken by developments, losing nearly 4% in a day, its worst session since September. Pascal Harta, who's in Barcelona, says people are particularly angry. The scandals broken at a time when Senor Rajoy wants them to make huge sacrifices. It's part of his strategy to tackle record unemployment and a savage recession.
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There's a phrase in Spain I used to find admirable for its infinite pragmatism. Es lochi ay. Which means that's what there is. It's said with a shrug of the shoulders, and it works on nearly any occasion from I ordered my squid without batter. Waiter. Well, that's what there is to the politician you voted for has embezzled millions in public money and your town hall is bankrupt. Response. Ah, well, that's what there is. But such an epidemic of corruption is now coming to light in Spain that it seems to me the national shrug of apathy is finally falling out of fashion. Taking its place is a look of abject disgust and the spat out words queberguenza. This means the shame of it. For the last few months, the corruption scandals have been so numerous that the television news began lumping them together in a swift round up. Rather than reporting on each one, they had to leave room for other news items like the effects of austerity cuts and rocketing unemployment. There's now a regular spot on Spaniards who used to have a job and a home and don't have either anymore. One featured a man who now lives in his car outside his former home. Austerity came up at a dinner party I was at. As it does in most conversations here these days, Spain's anti austerity protesters call themselves Los Indignados. Why aren't you more indignant about corruption, though? I asked A shrug. Someone poured more wine. Someone else said, corruption. That's just what there is. We can't be indignant if the politicians steal, he explained, because we're all at it. Take the man who came from the gas company to fix my boiler and offered to do it for me for half price if I paid him personally in cash, of course. I said yes. It is hard to get a receipt in Spain from the taxi drivers who tell you the ink has run out of the printer they're legally required to have on their dashboard. To the eminently respectable estate agent who had a framed photo of the king in his office from behind his spectacles. He told me if I wanted a receipt for his fee, he'd have to charge me €250 in tax. So in Spain you have to pay if you want to be indignant and righteous. Economists say without the black economy, there'd be rioting on the streets. People are getting by, they're just not telling the taxman. But suddenly the corruption scandals have become too big and the justice system is seen as too slow when it comes to punishing those with power. People aren't saying that's what there is now. The shame of it. They're shrieking at, for example, the news that a mother who used a cash card she found on the street is going to prison for a year and a half. She used it to buy €130 worth of food and nappies. People are angry that the King's son in law will only have some assets frozen if he doesn't pay his bail. His charitable organisation is accused of embezzling millions in public money that was supposed to be used to stage sporting events. He denies any wrongdoing. There are also the rumbling cases of the flamenco star who refutes charges that she money laundered for her husband while he was mayor of Marbella. And another ex mayor who says no, he didn't take cash off the Russian mafia. And then there's the big one. The recent revelations that the former treasurer of the governing Popular Party has been operating a 20 million euro Swiss bank account. The PP has strenuously denied that this money from no one knows who was handed over in cash stuffed envelopes to the party's top brass in exchange for who knows what. And this time the politicians are being pressed to answer the questions. And they are not used to it. They stand before cameras, blinking uncomfortably like moles newly emerged into the sunlight. Thousands demonstrated outside the ruling party headquarters, calling for the Prime Minister, Mariana Rajoy, to resign. They're not satisfied with the party announcement that it's going to investigate the allegations while simultaneously dismissing them as certainly untrue, Mr. Rahoy says the reputations of the majority of politicians, honest men and women dedicating their life to public work, are being unfairly tarnished by the alleged dishonesty of a few. But then documents were published in the left leaning Alpais newspaper which alleged that the prime minister was among the party members who had received one such bulging envelope from the Swiss bank account. It's a charge Mr. Rajoy strenuously rejects. And Mr. Ahoy is right. Spaniards are cynical about all their politicians in all the parties, but they're not shrugging anymore. They're angry. The other day a TV news crew was on the street asking people what should be done. One middle aged, mild looking woman replied, you know the French Revolution, where they cut off their heads? Well, something like that might do the trick.
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And that's Pascal Harter. Reports from Syria say that fighting between government forces and rebels around the capital, Damascus, is the most intense it's been for months. Local residents report unusually heavy bombing, while the state media says that army troops have cleared what they called nests of armed terrorists from the eastern outskirts of the city. Many of the districts on the edge of Damascus have become opposition strongholds in recent months. James Hawkin has been making regular journeys to Syria to report on development. He tells us now about one of his main contacts there, recently killed in the struggle.
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If any more Syrians who helped me report the conflict there get killed, no one's going to want to talk to me at all. The latest to go was a 24 year old activist turned rebel arms smuggler called Amjad Seafi, who died two weeks ago in a blizzard of Syrian army shells. We'd first met last July. I wrote it from our own correspondent piece about him when I came back. He had, it turned out, made quite a name for himself in the early months of Syria's rebellion, taking videos of regime brutality and uploading them to YouTube. When I met him a second time at a makeshift rebel logistics office near Turkey's border with Syria, he showed me his videos and I had to admit they were genuinely clever and subversive. By then, however, he'd already moved on. His girlfriend had been interrogated by secret police looking for information about him, and he'd fled Damascus for Jordan and then Turkey, where I met him. Videos alone, he decided, weren't going to topple the Syrian regime. The authorities he'd begun to suspect might actually prefer all this Facebooking and YouTubing. After all, a young man carrying a laptop or a mobile phone can't also be aiming a gun. A month later, he'd gone back into Syria himself, but we'd kept in touch using Facebook and Skype. I sent him my BBC report on his work, and he was thrilled, only chiding me for changing his name from Amjad to Jameel. Why would I want to do that? He asked. I was trying to protect you, I said. But like many Syrians in the conflict, he was beyond using pseudonyms. They knew who he was anyway, so why would he need to change his name? Before long, he was back in the outskirts of Damascus. The Syrian regime keeps a firm grip of the city center, but the outskirts are thick with rebels and being pulled apart by fierce fighting as well as regular bombardments from the air. A few months ago, I pinged him a message asking him how he was. It's getting more dangerous every day, he replied. Many of my friends have been arrested in the last two weeks under interrogation or torture. He worried they may talk about our work. Like many young rebels going into battle, he was also becoming more religious. He hadn't been like that as a student, one of his friends at Damascus University told me. But then he'd seen how Sunnis were bearing the brunt of the suffering in Syria's rebellion, and it had made him angry. Besides, said his old friend, Amjad had met new friends since he'd fled Syria at the border with Turkey. I'd met some of them. I'd arrived just as he and his comrades were receiving a group of wary looking guests, mainly Saudis, who were bringing money for arms and medicine. They're all Salafis, he admitted, a fundamentalist strain of Sunni Islam. I'm Salafi, too. My religion doesn't come from my father, but from the holy book. But if you write that, your readers and listeners will think I'm a Salafist, like Al Qaeda. It was a good point. There's a big difference between religious devotion and fanatical Islamist violence. But the growing religiosity of Syria's young rebels might be storing up problems for the country's future. Amjad thought of himself as a patriot above all else. All he wanted to do, he kept telling me, was to use his engineering skills to build the new Syria after the revolution. By the time of his death, however, he was putting them to a more unconventional use. Staying with a friend in Sacba, on Damascus eastern suburbs, he'd been distributing medicine and money. But he'd also been hard at work building homemade rockets to fire at the Syrian army. On the morning of 18th of January, just two weeks short of his 25th birthday, both he and his friend were killed in a bout of heavy shelling on the border. I had chided him that Salafis are too keen to die on the battlefield. I wouldn't want to go into battle with that lot, I'd said. He corrected me. It's not that we crave martyrdom, he'd said, but that we're prepared for death, which makes us stronger. I hope he found both strength and solace in the end.
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James Harkin Back now in London, Campaigners in India say tens of thousands of women are having their uteruses removed unnecessarily by unscrupulous doctors trying to make money. Most of the operations are said to have been carried out in northern states such as Rajasthan, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, as Jill McGivering's been finding out. In some cases, the women, many in their 20s and 30s, say the doctors frightened them into surgery by telling them wrongly they were suffering from cancer.
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Rajanti says she's barely 30, but she looks older. Her face is thin and drawn. She sits with her shoulders hunched and barely raises her eyes when she speaks. She covers her head and hides behind the hem of her bright blue scarf. She doesn't know what to do, she says. When I try to coax her to talk, she seems close to tears. Rajanthi is desperately worried about her health. I met her in a small village in rural Rajasthan, surrounded by mud walled houses and cows and a solitary strolling peacock. There's no government hospital nearby, so when Rajanthi recently had a bladder infection as well as heavy menstrual periods, she did what everyone round here does. She went to one of the many small private clinics which have sprung up to fill the healthcare gap. The doctor performed an ultrasound. She says he diagnosed a tumour in her uterus and said she needed a hysterectomy. In the next few days, Rajanti came home in turmoil, frightened both of surgery and of ignoring the doctor's advice. She has every reason to be worried about 90% of the women in her village have already had hysterectomies at private clin, many of them still feel unwell. I met Sunita and her sister in their 20s. They've both had the operation. Sunita says she went to see a private doctor about heavy periods. He diagnosed cancer of the uterus, although he'd only performed one ultrasound scan, which, according to other doctors, wouldn't be enough to know that she was rushed into surgery the same day. Her expression darkens as she remembers. I had complications and a lot more procedures, she said. At one point I lost consciousness and my family complained to the doctor. He threw my medical notes into the street and said he was finished with me. She lifted her hand to her face and bangles jangled at her wrist. I have no strength now, she said. I can't work. I can't even look after my children. Her family also suffered financially, selling their cattle and taking out a loan to pay for an operation which she may not have needed in the first place. Rajasthan is one of several Indian states where there's been an apparent surge in hysterectomies carried out by private clinics on poor, often illiterate villages. Once a uterus has been removed, it's hard to prove for certain whether the operation was necessary or not. But campaigners say they're convinced that some private doctors are frightening women into surgery just to make money from them. They point to the sheer number of hysterectomies, especially on young women, the pressure for operations to be carried out at once with no attempt to explore alternatives, and the use of just one ultrasound scan without follow up tests to diagnose cancer. I tracked down the clinic where Sunita had her operation and Rajanthi had just been advised to undergo surgery. The owner, sitting behind his desk, smiled and shook his head when I repeated the allegations made against him. A myth, he said. The women aren't telling the truth. His clinic, he insisted, was ethical and genuine. Government officials are well aware of the problem. One district magistrate in the state of Bihar organised a medical review for women who'd recently had hysterectomies in several hundred cases. Government doctors decided the operations hadn't been necessary. The magistrate is now pursuing legal action against the clinics involved who deny malpractice. A new law to regulate and monitor private clinics is being introduced. Officials admit it will take time to process. In the meantime, the clinics are still in business and the hysterectomies continue. Before I left Rajasthan, I arranged for Rajanti from the village to be driven to the state capital to see an independent gynecologist and get a second opinion. Rajanthi looked sick with nerves when she arrived with her husband. I sat on a wooden bench in the corridor outside while the doctor examined her, looked over Rajante's medical notes and made her diagnosis. Rajanti's relief when she finally emerged told its own story. The doctor agreed that yes, there was a growth in the uterus but she described it not as a tumour but as a benign fibroid. The symptoms could probably be treated by a course of medicine, she said. In her opinion, there was every chance Rajanthi wouldn't need surgery at all. Outside, I asked Rajanthi what advice she would give other local women who were urged by a private doctor to have a hysterectomy as a matter of urgency. Don't do it, she said. Simply get more tests done. Only have the operation as a last resort.
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And that was Jill McGivering so the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan say they'll try to achieve a peace settlement for Afghanistan within six months. After their talks in London earlier this week, the prime minister, David Cameron, said the two leaders had achieved an unprecedented level of cooperation. The discussions focused on how to secure peace across the Afghan Pakistan border. Mr. Karzai appealed to the Taliban to participate in the peace process so that, as he put it, everyone in Afghanistan could help build the country's future. No one, however, can doubt that as NATO forces continue their withdrawal from Afghanistan, there are huge challenges ahead, as well as militant attacks and continuing insecurity, there's a weak economy to contend with. Orlagarin's been talking to one Afghan official who's juggling those problems while trying to stay one step ahead of the Taliban.
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For Abdul Basir Salangi, the day starts on the treadmill. The middle aged governor with a hint of a beard dons a tracksuit and works out for an hour. In Afghanistan, it pays to be fighting fit, especially if you're on a Taliban hit list. And it's useful to be a crack shot, as the governor proved 18 months ago. It was August 2011 and staff heard shooting outside his office in Parwan Province, an hour from the capital, Kabul. Militants were storming the compound. When the governor ran to the window, he saw a suicide bomber coming straight for him. He reached for his AK47. He reenacted the scene for me, leaping up onto a window sill in his sombre dark suit and pale green tie, assault rifle in hand. There was a lot of firing at us, he said, crouching down and pretending to take aim. I moved into position and shot one man. He fell and the firing stopped. Then there were many explosions. The governor had shot dead one of six suicide bombers sent to target him. Before the assault was over, the militants had killed 22 people, mainly members of his staff. In his four years in office, he has survived three assassination attempts, but he has no plans for a career change. I want to stay in this job and I want to wipe out the Taliban, he told me, laying down his weapon and readjusting his stylish watch. When we visited the governor in his cavernous office, his inbox was full. Turbaned elders were waiting to meet him. Assistants were lined up with stacks of paperwork requiring his signature. And there was an intelligence warning about another suicide bomber sent to kill him, believed to be already in the area. The governor sat at a gleaming wooden desk beneath a row of chandeliers with his AK47 by his side, as it has been since he was 17. That's when he started fighting the Russians with Afghanistan's legendary resistance leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud. The governor was a field commander in Massoud's Northern Alliance. After fighting the Soviets, he fought the Taliban. Over lunch of lamb skewers, spicy soup and rice, he insisted his country could stand alone by 2014, when foreign troops leave, and he dismissed talk of another Afghan civil war. Our security forces and intelligence service will be properly equipped by then, he said, and they won't let anyone start a war. The governor said budgets, not militants, were his biggest problem. We don't have the money to build all the schools and clinics we need, he said, banging the table with his fist. I have about 50,000 students who are studying in tents. We joined him for a trip to a local college, where he inspected renovation work at the entrance. Five heavily armed bodyguards fanned out around him and didn't let him linger in public for long. In a corridor inside the college, young men lined up for a pep talk from the governor before their exams. If you study hard in class, he said, you won't shed your blood on the battlefield. But he knows they may well join the ranks of Parwan's unemployed. Only 1 in 10 here has a job. The governor has been accused of corruption in the past, something he denies. He insists he's building a brighter future, and he took us to see a subsidized housing estate he's developing at the edge of town. Snow was falling, and construction work was at a standstill in the biting cold. He gave us a tour of the site, pointing out where families will sit on their balconies in the evenings and where the coffee shop and the swimming pool will be. That's if his plans aren't curtailed by lack of funding. As he headed back to his bulletproof car, the governor insisted the Taliban could not take power here again. They are being defeated, he said. They will accept the peace process, and the moderates can be involved in power sharing. But if the militants come back to target him again. He says he'll be ready with his assault rifle. I will fight them, he said a thousand times.
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Olagarin in Afghanistan. Well, sadly, Mali's football team have failed to provide a fairy tale ending to their bid to win the Africa cup of Nations. In the semifinals of the tournament yesterday, they went down 4:1 to Nigeria. But it's still been quite a week in Mali. The French president flew in to newly liberated Timbuktu to be greeted by thousands of cheering, dancing well wishers. He'll surely have enjoyed all those cries of Vive la France. This morning, the French led operation to remove Islamist rebels from the north of the country continues. Heavy fighting has been reported around the key northern city of Gao. But in Timbuktu, after the euphoria of the presidential visit, residents have been trying to restore some normality to their lives. As Thoma Fessi has been observing, the
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cloud of dust was so thick it was hard to breathe. I was trying to write up another script in the corridor, but a member of the hotel staff was sweeping the floor, whipping the dust into the air. This was the morning after Hotel La Colombe reopened. It had been closed for 10 months during the occupation of Al Qaeda militants and their allies. When a bunch of reporters showed up shortly after the French recaptured the city, the hotel manager, Mohamed Touret, couldn't believe his ears. A group of Westerners was offering to pay to stay in a building where nothing was working. Mr. Tourez looked up and lifted his arms to the sky. He gave us a huge smile of relief and thanked God, exclaiming Alhamdulillah. I didn't think I would ever see Europeans again, he said. He told us that tourism had suffered over the past few years because of a rise in hostage taking in the region. But his hotel was never short of guests. The coup against the government in Bamako, followed by the arrival of Islamist militants in Timbuktu on 1 April last year, left him with no choice. He had to close. I would have nothing to do, he tells me, but I would still be up by six o' clock and I would sit on the front steps of the hotel reading a novel all day long. When we first arrived, a small crowd of local people emerged, desperate to help out to earn some money. The reporters, they found, had a list of items they urgently required. We needed reliable power supplies, so generators and good torches were priorities. Soon the hotel's terrace was unrecognizable, as a forest of satellite dishes and cables sprung up between the plastic tables and Chairs. A local man toured each table, asking whether we fancied mutton for supper. He told us that he planned to roast a whole animal stuffed with couscous for everyone to share. Sounded good to us, but when he came back with the cooked beast the two hours later, it was clear he thought we'd ordered the huge animal just for the four of us. Happily, compromise was reached. We did have to pay for half of the sheep, but there was mutton for all the news teams. It didn't take long for trade to return to Timbuktu. Within days of our arrival, a craftsman had laid out a piece of local fabric with cotton shirts, wooden souvenirs and Tuareg silver knives. But conditions were still far from normal. When we did get to bed, sleep was difficult. Mattresses were dusty, bedsheets filthy and torn. Electricity was in short supply. It cut out at noon each day. We soon got used to those generators roaring away hour after hour. Running water was also scarce. A few drops for a shower felt like a real luxury. But the real surprises were called Guines and Castell. Cases of the foreign beers had been buried underground when the fundamentalist fighters banned alcohol in town. At last it was time to dig them up. The bottles were caked in dust, like a good French wine kept in a traditional cellar. There weren't, however, to many of them, so of course they were sold at wartime prices. It's been a great thrill talking to men and women who are experiencing freedom again after months of harsh Islamist rule. But strange that the tourists and backpackers who the people of Timbuktu were used to have been replaced by journalists and soldiers. Nevertheless, it means a bit of work and cash for residents who had little of either while the extremists were in town. Tourism used to generate significant revenues for Mali's economy. Soon it will benefit from a new flow of people. Journalists, aid workers soon to arrive, UN staff and other soon to be permanent delegations. As he struggled to believe his hotel was reopening at long last, Mohamed Turet told me that in the last few months, he'd only been able to afford one meal a day with his family. But since you guys arrived, he told me with a smile, we're able to enjoy three meals once again.
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Three meals a day and beer as well. Thoma Fessi, with news of changing times in Timbuktu and bringing another edition to a close. I'll be back with more from reporters around the world on Saturday morning at half past eleven. Do join us. Goodbye.