← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Dilemma for the US
00:28:01
'Getting rid of Saddam was the easy bit. ' The problems stack up for the United States...
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Narrator/Reporter
You have downloaded from our own correspondent.
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Kate Ady
This edition is the latest one broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and here to introduce it is Kate Ady.
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Various Reporters (including Matthew Teller, Lucy Irvine, John Murphy, Emma Jane Kirby)
Hello. Today, Antarctica's the driest, coldest, windiest place on Earth. So why are so many countries planting their flags on the ice? How April's avalanche in the Himalayas didn't just cost lives. Livelihoods have been hit as well. The neighbours had warned her about gypsies. We find out what happened when a British woman in Bulgaria gave work to a Roma. And there's an ELF warning why the Icelandic highways department would rather divert roads than risk angering the elves. All that and Iraq. More fightings reported there as government troops try to halt the advance of ISIS and other Sunni militants towards the capital, Baghdad. The Iraqi government has formally requested US air support to fight the insurgents who seize several cities in the north. There's speculation that any decision on military support from Washington could hinge now on political changes in Baghdad. So is Iraq on the brink of a horrific sectarian civil war? Is it about to shatter into its component parts? Questions for Jim Muir, who spent much time in the country since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. This morning, he is in Erbil in
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Jim Muir
Iraqi Kurdistan, some months before the American led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The man who's now president of Iraqi Kurdistan, Masoud Barzani, knew it was coming. He wasn't keen, despite everything Saddam Hussein had done to the Kurds. Getting rid of Saddam is the easy bit, he told me. It's what happens after that that's the problem every time I saw him. Later, through subsequent upheavals, he said, remember what I told you. History may look back at the astonishing fall of Mosul last week as the moment when Iraq's disintegration became inevitable. As President Barzani's nephew, Netcher Van, who's prime minister here, said on Sunday, there's Iraq before Mosul and there's Iraq after Mosul. Exactly how the city fell to the fighters of ISIS and their allies with such stunning speed has not yet been fully explained. Two Iraqi army divisions collapsed. Their officers fled, leaving the men leaderless and confused. Prime Minister Nouriel Maliki muttered darkly about betrayal and plots. The streets and cafes are awash with conspiracy theories about Kurdish involvement in precipitating the army collapse to punish Mr. Maliki for withholding Kurdistan's share of national oil revenues for months, a bill had angered him. But by selling its oil directly to Turkey. The theory may be fanciful, but the fact is that the first Beneficiary of the turmoil has been Kurdistan. As Iraqi army troops broke and fled from many parts of the north, Kurdish forces moved forward. They've taken over all the disputed territory they historically claim as part of Kurdistan, including crucially, Kirkuk province with its rich oil fields. Kirkuk, the city, and is the Jerusalem of the Kurds. Most of them are thrilled that at last it's theirs. They clearly don't intend to give it back. They're already planning to sell Kirkuk oil through their Turkey pipeline, boosting their production perhaps as high as a million barrels a day by the end of the year. Some doubters fear there may be a reckoning for that if Iraq's Arabs ever get their act together again. A bigger worry is much more present. Iraqi Kurdistan's 1,000 kilometer border is now with Island ISIS. What kind of neighbor will it turn out to be? So far, ISIS rule over Mosul seems to have had a relatively light touch. In fact, ISIS has made common cause with a raft of Iraqi Sunni groups bitterly opposed to Nouri Al Maliki's Shia dominated government in Baghdad. They accuse him of marginalizing and victimizing the Sunnis. They too have taken up arms against him. That's what gives ISIS far more depth and cover than it would otherwise have. And it presents a massive dilemma for the Americans and others. They can see the atrocities, the mass execution of Shia soldiers who surrendered that ISIS itself boasted about on the Internet. But they can also see that Mr. Maliki's policies have alienated substantial sections of Sunni society. That's why ISIS has been able to strike roots. So what do you do? With ISIS teamed up with disgruntled Sunni former soldiers and tribesmen, and Mr. Maliki's security forces joined by Shia volunteers and the Iranian backed militias he's mobilized, it's looking increasingly like an ugly civil war right ahead, if it's not there already. For the Americans to bomb ISIS would be to take sides in that civil war and then the proxy regional war going on here in which the Saudis and other American allies back the Sunnis and Iran. Washington's adversaries supports the Shia. Iran has spent years building up the Shia militias in Iraq and and Hezbollah in Lebanon. It's used both to help shore up its strategic ally, Bashar Al Assad in Syria. Now it's preparing to do the same in Iraq. For Iran as for isis, the two wars are merged. The question is, does it want to help produce a political agreement involving the Shia, Sunnis and Kurds that might just stand a chance of pulling the country back together. To achieve that, part of the price might be to drop Nouriel Maliki, as many Sunnis, Kurds, and even rival Shia would like. Or Iran might prefer the alternative? An increasingly dependent, largely Shia entity in the south and Baghdad engaged in permanent running conflict with the Sunni areas to north and west. Rattled though it may be by the startling ISIS advance, Iran still holds most of the cards in Iraq. Perhaps that's why Britain decided this week to reopen its embassy in Tehran. Looking at the mess next door as they take up their post, its diplomats may reflect that Mr. Barzani was right. Getting rid of Saddam was the easy bit.
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Various Reporters (including Matthew Teller, Lucy Irvine, John Murphy, Emma Jane Kirby)
And that's Jim Muir. Scientists have again voiced fears about the melting of glaciers in Antarctica. A team led by the US Space Agency NASA has been studying six of the biggest ice streams and concludes nothing can be done now to stop them melting way. Don't panic, though, the researchers say nothing sudden's about to happen. That ice might take centuries to melt now. Antarctica isn't just a place which interests the scientists. Matthew Teller's been finding out why so many countries around the world are keen to stake a claim on this vast and largely empty terrain.
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Kate Ady
I pick a path between rock pools and settle on a boulder. A spectacular, silent view unfolds across a mountain fringed bay. There's a flash of white and black in the shallows. What on earth is that? My slow brain ponders. As before my eyes, a gentoo penguin slips out of the water, eyes me cheekily, squawks and patters off into the snow. Antarctica is the hardest place I know to write about. Try to pin down the experience of being there and the words dissolve under your fingers. There are no points of reference. Antarctica is inhuman. Other deserts, from Arabia to Arizona, are peopled. Humans live in or around them, find sustenance in them, shape them with their imagination and their ingenuity. People have done little to shape Antarctica. It is the driest, coldest, windiest place in the world. So why then have Britain, France, Australia, Norway and a fistful of other countries drawn lines on Antarctica's map, carving up the empty ice with territorial claims? Antarctica is not a country. It has no government and no indigenous population. Instead, the entire continent has been set aside as a scientific preserve under the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, enshrining an ideal of global intellectual exchange. Military activity is banned, as is prospecting for minerals. 50 states have now ratified the treaty and its associated agreements. Yet one legacy of earlier imperial expeditions, when Shackleton and the rest battled blizzards to plant Their flags is national covetousness. Science drives human investigation in Antarctica today. Yet there's a reason why geologists often take center stage. Governments really want to know what's under the ice. Whisper the word oil. Some predictions suggest the amount of oil in Antarctica could be 200 billion barrels, far more than Kuwait or Abu Dhabi. Antarctic oil is extremely difficult and at the moment prohibitively expensive to extract. But it's impossible to predict what the global economy will look like in 2048, when the protocol banning Antarctic prospecting comes up for renewal. By that stage, an energy hungry world could be desperate. The Antarctic Treaty has put all territorial claims into abeyance, but that hasn't stopped rule bending. The best way to get a toehold on what may lie beneath is to act as if you own the place. One of the things nation states do is stamp passports, so when Antarctic tourists visit the British outposts at Port Lockroy, they can have their passport stamped. Yet international law doesn't recognize the existence of the British Antarctic Territory. Indeed, both Chile and Argentina claim the same piece of land and have their own passport stamps at the ready. Another thing states do, or used to, is operate postal services. At Ukraine's Vernadsky base, I wrote myself a postcard, bought a fancy Ukrainian stamp with a cow on it and dropped it into their postbox. It took two months to arrive. Not bad. From the ends of the earth, Russia has made a point of building bases all round the Antarctic continent. The United States operates a base at the South Pole, which conveniently straddles every territorial claim. This year, China built its fourth base. Next year it will build a fifth. All Antarctica's 68 bases are professedly peaceful research stations established for scientific purposes. But Chile and Argentina, for instance, both maintain a permanent army presence. And the worry is that some countries are either not reporting military deployment or may instead be recruiting civilian security contractors for essentially military missions. Antarctic skies are unusually clear and also unusually free from radio interference. They are ideal for deep space research and satellite tracking. But they are also ideal for establishing, say, covert surveillance networks or remote control of offensive weapons systems. The Australian government recently identified China's newest base as a threat specifically because of the surveillance potential. It said Antarctic bases are increasingly used for dual use scientific research that's useful for military purposes. Many governments reject Antarctica's status quo, built on European endeavour and entrenched by Cold War geopolitics that some say give undue influence to the superpowers of the past. Iran has said it intends to build in Antarctica. Turkey, too. India has a long history of Antarctic involvement. Pakistan has approved Antarctic expansion all in the name of science. But the status quo depends on self regulation. The Antarctic Treaty has no teeth. Faced with intensifying competition over abundant natural resources and unforeseen intelligence gathering opportunities, all it can do, like my penguin, is squawk and patter off into the snow.
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Various Reporters (including Matthew Teller, Lucy Irvine, John Murphy, Emma Jane Kirby)
And that was Matthew Teller. Five years ago, the then mayor of Sofia made the controversial pronouncement that Bulgaria's biggest problem was, as he put it, bad human material. Today, Boyko Borisov is leader of a Bulgarian opposition which swept a victory in the recent European election. Back in his mayoral days, he'd left it in no doubt he was referring, among others, to the country's Gypsy, or Roma, population. In Bulgaria, as in other parts of Eastern Europe, the Roma are often regarded as layabouts, parasites and thieves. Lucy Irvine, a British woman who has lived in Bulgaria for several years, has seen these prejudices up close. She's also tried to help one young Roma man find work.
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Lucy Irvine
Dimke brought her youngest son to help me on my new property. She's a Roma matriarch from the mahla, or ghetto, in the Bulgarian village where I live. My land was unkempt. But was this lad nervously twisting the family workhorse's mane, the ideal handyman? Demke assured me he was clever and that he went to church in bad Bulgarian. I asked his age and whether he could lay paving slabs. Osman said he was 14 and could not only lay slabs, but provide them too. Bulgarian neighbours had warned me against gypsies. They'd only want access to my place to case it for thieving opportunities, they said. But I gave Osman a try. He wasn't at school, I learned, because he'd been excluded for non attendance. He'd truanted to hall water to where his mother grew food and to hew wood for the stove. His Turkish father, a cowherd, couldn't do everything. He worked 12 hours a day. I rode with Osman on the cart to where the paving slabs were dumped in a river. Graceful acacias lined bank strewn with plastic bags and wild squash. Bulgarians and Roma swam here in summer, I was told. Osman worked for me for three years before things turned ugly for him. His mare plowed my peach field. He wove fences from reeds and he paved my courtyard, adding flourishes between slabs with glittering stones from the hills above our village. His ambition was to be different, he said, not end up sniffing glue or stealing like other boys or herding cows. For extra cash, Osman sold wild tortoises which he discovered I didn't like boiled like his father did. I released them in the garden. He caught a cat in a sack for me too. I learned how bad things were for him at home when I was living in a caravan on the edge of Nagore, or up there, where the village ends and the wilds begin and there are snakes and bears. You don't go there after dark. But one night Osman did. Taking a shortcut to my caravan, he defied his father over a marriage arranged for him, been beaten and kicked out. Could I find him work abroad? I found him a farm job in the uk. But first there was an interview in Sofia and having rarely left the village, Osman was nervous, heading to the capital. There he froze, answering questions only with I don't know. He blamed his failure on the fact that the interviewer was Bulgarian. Osman was allowed home, but the work I gave him wasn't enough for him to contribute to his father's satisfaction. He was now 17. So with friends I offered to kick start a small business. He wasn't short of ideas. If he had a camera, he could take photos at Makla weddings. People would pay, but only two people paid over six months before the camera broke. Ice cream in summer was another brainwave. The family had a freezer I didn't need. I stocked it and he sold out fast. But he could never save up to restock because his mother always needed cash for housekeeping. She also wanted the freezer for the pig being fattened. For his betrothal. His father would find another girl and he'd surely not argue again. So another winter came, with Osman no nearer independence. People needed wood, he said, so we bought a chainsaw. But again he had few clients and the chainsaw broke with a hand saw. He tried making chairs, but villagers laughed. Plastic ones were cheaper. One August night I had another desperate visit. Osman was being threatened by the brothers of 15 year old Mareka, who he'd lain with under the acacias by the river. Her age in Roma eyes was not the problem, but that she'd been ruined for marriage. He must have a public betrothal or else. Osman is no wimp, but the entire Mahler was on the side of the girl's family. He needed at least 300 LEVs for the engagement, about £150, and he begged a loan. The months following the betrothal saw Osman lose weight and become withdrawn. His mother complained that Mareka, now living in, couldn't cook, couldn't dig and wasn't even pregnant until suddenly she was the whole mahla celebrated the arrival of the baby, a son bringing the father special kudos. And it was as though the ambition to be different, which Osman doubted he'd fulfil for himself now, was transferred to his son. Not much has changed on the surface. Osman continues to live hand to mouth. But something has changed in him. He says proudly that his son will attend school properly, and I can see again the spark I spotted in the shy 14 year old I first met who, unasked, laid glittery stones between the paving slabs in my courtyard.
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Various Reporters (including Matthew Teller, Lucy Irvine, John Murphy, Emma Jane Kirby)
Lucy Irvine in Bulgaria the climbing season on Mount Everest has just come to a close and it's been one of the worst on record. Badly affected by the avalanche there in April, which resulted in heavy loss of life. Usually several hundred climbers come to this corner of Nepal every year, paying large sums for the right to scale the world's highest mountain. The whole region is dependent on the money brought in by the foreign visitors. But the avalanche has meant many of them have stopped coming, and as John Murphy's been hearing, that's hit the local economy hard.
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Narrator/Reporter
From a distance he resembles an extremely old man, bent over, shuffling along slowly in his slippers. He only needs a walking frame to complete the picture, though he does have an intriguing looking walking stick. As he approaches with his head bowed and his face horizontal to the rough path, it's still impossible to make out his age or his features. For a while we've been having a kind of highland tortoise and the hare race. It's my first day at this height in the Himalayas and the reduced oxygen levels and I have to admit a lack of competition. Fitness make it impossible to walk far up the path without regular pauses for breath. The old man, on the other hand, with an enormous load on his back, plods along steadily. Eventually he too stops for a rest. He shifts his T shaped solid hardwood walking stick from his right hand to behind his back. Slowly he unfolds himself and lowers his cargo onto the top of the stick. It turns out this support is called a tokma. Now I get a first glimpse of his face. His nose and mouth are covered with a cloth and there are beads of sweat on his forehead, though nothing like the amount I've been sweating. Only when he removes the cloth and wipes his brow can I see he's not an old man. It turns out that Rajkumar Rai is 35. He's not from the Sherpa minority, but like many Sherpas, he's one of a steady stream of porters carrying impossibly large loads who make the journey by foot from Lukla, a gateway to the highlands, up to Nanche Bazaar and further up the Everest trail. Rajkumar is touchingly shy as I try to take his picture. How much weight are you carrying? I ask him. 95 kilos, he says. Judging by his frame and slight build, it must be almost double his own body weight. Most of the strain is taken by his back, his neck and a strap across his forehead. He explains that the journey will take him two days and he's being paid 30 rupees a kilo. A quick bit of mental arithmetic reveals he'll get just over £20 for the Herculean task. I inspect what he's carrying. Tea, tinned juice, dried lentils, but most prominently, dozens of cans of beer. This is how Nepal's important tourist trade in trekking and mountaineering is kept supplied. There are no roads here, so it's people like Rajkumar, along with mules and jobkyars, a cross between a cow and a yak, that are the main means of transport. But it's the humans who appear to bear the brunt of the loads. Why do you cover your face with a cloth? I ask. As he explains it becomes obvious. The job's hard enough as it is, and with his face to the ground, he doesn't want to breathe in the dust and the flies from the animal droppings. Slowly I regain my breath from the exertion of carrying my 8 kilogram backpack uphill. I wonder what Rajkumar, in his thin plimsolls and 95 kilos on his back, makes of us Western weaklings dressed in the latest mountain clothes and sturdy walking boots. With our own set of porters carrying our large rucksacks and equipment, he's too polite to take the opportunity to score a point. It's natural for you not to be so strong here, he says, because you come from somewhere else. How do you feel about your job? I ask Rajkumar as he prepares to set off again. I'm happy, comes the reply. Then he adds, but there's no choice. Those are words I hear again and again over the next few days when talking to porters and to the Sherpas who are so vital to any expedition up the highest mountain in the world. 33 year old Mingmar Gyaljan Sherpa was carrying loads from Everest Base Camp up the Khumbu icefall to Camp One in the early hours of April 18 this year. He was lucky to be near the front of the train of Sherpas at 6:45 in the morning, just two minutes behind him, a massive ice avalanche came crashing down. Sixteen Sherpas were killed, some of them the most experienced mountaineers in their community, as well as a cook who was about to retire. They'd gone ahead to carry equipment and prepare the route for Western climbers. Behind them we heard the noise, then it went white, mingma explained. Afterwards, we heard the cries of one of our friends, but we couldn't reach him. We knew people had died. The day we spoke to him, three bodies still hadn't been found. It was the worst accident in Everest's modern history. So, Mingmar, are you afraid of the mountain? Yes, he said. Will you go back? Yes. There's no choice.
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Various Reporters (including Matthew Teller, Lucy Irvine, John Murphy, Emma Jane Kirby)
John Murphy in Nepal now we don't have much to do with elves in this country, but in Iceland you mess with an elf at your peril. They've been around, mentioned in literature for a thousand years or more. Some say they are the cast out children of Adam and Eve. There is doubt about what they look like, probably because they are usually invisible. However, they do sometimes show up in dreams, we are told, warning of possible danger ahead. Elves are usually on your side, so Icelanders go to great lengths to avoid angering them, as Emma Jane Kirby has
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Emma Jane Kirby
been learning from his desk at the Icelandic Highways Department in Reykjavik. Peter Matthjersson smiles at me warmly from behind his glasses, but firmly let's get this straight before we start, he says. I do not believe in elves. I raise my eyebrows slightly and incline my head towards his computer screen, which is displaying the plans for a new road in an neighbouring town. There are two yellow circles marked on the plans, one that reads Elf Church and another that reads Elf Chapel. Peter sighs. Ok, he acknowledges wearily. But it's not every day in Iceland that we divert roads for elves. He grins shyly. It's just in this case we were warned that elves were living in some of the rocks in the path of the road and, well, we have to respect that belief. He picks up his car keys. Come on, he says indulgently. I'll show you where the elves live. Surveys suggest that over half of Icelanders believe in, or at least entertain the possibility of the existence of the Hudelfolk, the hidden people. Just to be clear, Icelandic elves are not the small green pointy eared variety that helps Santa pack the toys at Christmas. They're the same size as you and I. They're just invisible to most of us mainly. They're a peaceable breed, but if you treat them with disrespect for example, by blasting dynamite through their rock houses and churches. They're not reticent about showing their displeasure. During our car journey, Pieter tells me several stories about how elves are suspected to be behind bulldozer breakdowns and a series of workman accidents. As I step out of the car at the site of the elf church, a vicious gust of icy wind punches me full in the face, making me stagger backwards onto the black volcanic rock. Iceland's rugged landscape is no bucolic idyll. The very ground boils and spits irrationally. The surrounding craggy black mountains fester menacingly, and above the sky is constantly herniated by the iron grey clouds it strains to hold up. It's a visceral roar and brutal beauty, which makes Heathcliff's Wuthering heights look like a prissy pastoral watercolour. You can't explain professor of Folklore Atelheida Guthmannsdottir, when I went to visit her at the university. Live in this landscape and not believe in a force that's greater than you. She looked at me imploringly. Please don't portray Icelanders as uneducated peasants who believe in fairies, she said. But just look around you and you'll understand why the power of folklore is so strong here. It is, of course, also strong in the tourism trade. On the main road into town from the airport, elves live here. Signs try to lure the fanciful into spending a few thousand kroner on a tour of an elf village, a CD of mystical music, or, for the less whimsical, perhaps an I had sex with an elf in Iceland T shirt. Peter and I have now reached the 12 foot high jagged rock that's apparently home to the elf chapel. I scour it closely, but apart from an ant or two scuttling to find some shelter in its moss encrusted crevices, I can see no signs of any life, mythological or other. Pieta eyes me suspiciously. I could tell you about our family elf, he begins tentatively. I encourage him to tell his tale and learn that the Matteersons had a protective elf in the wild north of the country called who'd brought them good fortune. When he'd gone on a hiking trip to the isolated area, his father asked his son to go and pay his respects to the elf and to thank her. But I don't believe in elves, pieter reminds me, so I sort of forgot. The next day, he continues, despite the overcast sky and drizzle, he woke up so badly, blistered by what appeared to be sunburn that he could hardly stand. As we turn into the blustering wind, we catch each other's eye. We both have one hand gripped onto the rock with a desperation of gamblers clinging to a lucky charm. We walk back towards the car in a smug complicity of being almost non believers.
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Various Reporters (including Matthew Teller, Lucy Irvine, John Murphy, Emma Jane Kirby)
Elf and safety begin. Iceland. That's Emma Jane Kirby bringing us to the end of today's edition. More tales from far and wide on Saturday morning at half past eleven. Do join us. Good bye.