← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Discontent on the Nile
00:27:47
'Everything is worse after the revolution' - tourism workers along the River Nile in...
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Hello.
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This is a download of from our own correspondent. We make one edition of the programme for the BBC World Service, but this is the one broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Here to introduce it, Kate Ady.
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Hello. In this programme, if it's safe, why all the police? The tourist industry along the Nile in Egypt rails against the new Islamist government in Cairo. How some refugees from the fighting in Syria are finding a lavish welcome from Hezbollah militants in northern Lebanon. We learn that dreams can come true for the orphans of Romania, but they may have to wait 23 years. And why English policemen had to listen to tales about County Fermanagh long into the balmy night. The Egyptian Minister of Tourism, Hesham Zazou, resigned yesterday in protest at the appointment of a new governor in the city of Luxor. The man, Adal Khayat, has links to a former militant group which was behind a deadly attack on tourists in the 1990s. The Egyptian Prime Minister has not accepted Mr. Zazou's resignation, but the Minister says he won't resume his work. Matthew Teller says tourism is a vital lifeline in the cities along the Nile, and some of those dependent on it believe the authorities aren't giving them the support they need.
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A voice called out behind me, mister. Hey, Mister. He was a captain of the Egyptian police, a handgun holstered on his hip, and he had a serious look on his face. I explained I was just crossing the road to meet a friend. He waggled a finger at me. No, no. There followed 15 minutes of discussion before I was allowed to proceed, after he'd noted my passport and my friend's name, address and phone number. The police in Minya can be jumpy around foreigners. This Nile side city of a quarter of a million people saw devastating violence in the 1990s during an insurgency led by the Gama Islamiya. Attacks had already been on the rise when in 1992, militants announced they would begin targeting tourists. A bloody campaign of bombings and shootings culminated in a horrific attack at the 3,500-year-old Temple of Queen Hatshepsut in Luxor in 1997. When 62 people died, Egyptian public opinion was outraged. Even hardline Islamist groups denounced the massacre. The subsequent government crackdown killed many militants in and around Minya and put many more in jail. By then, tourism to the whole central section of Egypt was at or near zero. Cruise ships were withdrawn from the long stretch of the Nile between Cairo and Luxor. Cities at the heart of the insurgency, such as Minya and its neighbour Asyut, disappeared from tourist itineraries almost 20 years on, with the insurgency defeated, Egyptian tourism is back in the doldrums. This time, post revolutionary instability and a deteriorating international image are to blame. Both are compounded by a faltering Muslim Brotherhood government, for whom it's hard to find much enthusiasm among Egyptian travel industry bigwigs. They don't know how to run a country, one tourism executive fumed to me. But they do know how to spread their influence. In Minya, as elsewhere around Egypt, the new governor is a Muslim Brotherhood placeman. I drove to see his clifftop residence, its high walls bedecked with fairy lights on the edge of New Minya, a Mubarak era collection of mean little concrete houses packed around barren roundabouts. Despite generous housing subsidies, sand blown, New Minya is a ghost town. People prefer to live where they've always lived down by the Nile. As street lights came on in Minya's Old Quarter, highlighting rococo curlicues on the abandoned villas of 20th century cotton magnets, many people told me of a deepening atmosphere of political repression. We need a new revolution, said Magid Nabil, who works for an Egyptian microcredit ngo. If the president doesn't make a break with the Muslim Brotherhood, there will be all out street war. This summer, tourism is returning to Minya. The ban on cruising has been lifted and passenger vessels are once again plying the full length of the Nile, bringing tourists to previously hard to reach ancient sites the startlingly colorful 4000 year old tombs at Beni Hasan and Tell, El Amarna, royal capital of Tutankhamun's father, Akhenaten. But armed plain clothes police are posted aboard every ship, and police launches bob about in the wake. Tourists who wish to explore Minya or Asyut independently may do so only with police escort. If it's safe, why all the police? And if it's not safe, why are tourists being allowed back? We're treading on eggshells, one boat manager told me. We do what the police tell us. Egypt's tourism industry relies on mass movements of people in aircraft, direct to beachfront resorts, or in tour buses between archaeological sites. Personal encounters are kept to a bare minimum. That concentrates power in the hands of big business. Tourism brings in billions of, yet most Egyptians scrape by on next to nothing. Something's clearly wrong. Yet faced with current instability, many now hanker for the bad old days when at least the arriving planes were full. These days, nine out of 10 hotel rooms in Luxor are empty. In Minya, still reliant on cotton, sugarcane and cement production, it's hard to see tourism making a difference. On a lane behind the brightly lit Sukho, Yahya, Senussi cracked a tired smile. He works a full day in Minya's tax office and then is out each evening until midnight selling vegetables off a barrow to make ends meet. Everything is worse after the revolution, he told me. Safety is down, prices are up. People need bread and fuel, and we have neither. And then he looked hard at me to make sure that I got the message. Egypt's resources are being mismanaged, he said.
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Matthew Teller on the banks of the River Nile, it's more than 20 years now since the world learned of the shocking conditions in which many were living in Romanian orphanages. There was an instant reaction as television pictures of the neglected boys and girls were flashed around the world. This was shortly after the fall of the Communist government there in 1989. Contraception and abortion had been banned under the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. As the birth rate soared, many children were abandoned and locked away in terrible conditions, along with the disabled and mentally ill. Appeals were launched, money was raised, and people keen to help flew in from around the world. One of them was Tessa Dunlop. She's just been back to Romania to see if two decades on the lot of the orphans has improved.
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To arrive in Suret is to arrive at the world's end. The train from Bucharest, clatterboom, clatterboom through the night, goes only as far as Suchava, an historic city mauled by the Communists. Immediately after the 89 revolution, I travelled from here to Suret in an elusive taxi. Now Catalin, with his own hire car firm and a canary yellow cap, waits for me at the station, ostentatiously dusting down his Vauxhall Astra. The drive hurtling between cabbages and corn, horses with their carts and a pink sky that crashes into the Moldavian plains is a reminder of how far you've come from the dusty fog of Bucharest, Garada Nord Suret was a quiet border town spitting distance from the vast expanse of the USSR. Change came abruptly in 1990 when its secret was exposed on an international stage. In a four story former Austrian army barracks, a Romania hid its largest gulag for abandoned and disabled children far away from the capital. Communists didn't cope well with imperfection. In came the foreign do gooders. The broken orphans learnt to cry, and Surrette's entrepreneurs sourced German beer for their prestigious newcomers. Some charities lasted the course, others moved on with the rolling tide of news. But amidst the global opprobrium, Suret and Many of its abandoned young stayed put. They are adults now. Few were adopted. It turns out Westerners don't cope well with imperfection either. Eventually the barracks was abandoned. The hundred plus adults, unable to live independently, were moved to another austere stone building, smaller this time, with wire nettings and landings overlooking a concrete courtyard. Dribs and drabs of foreign money have paid for new sheltered accommodation for the lucky few. But more than 20 years after the revolution, the most vulnerable adults still rock back and forth in a building that resembles a human hen coop. When they saw us, the young adults ran over, euphoric, anticipating attention, touching the camera, hugging me and the other visitors, keen for a small shard of love, a reminder of what it used to be like when the foreigners came to play. Two decades on, and the familiar smell of sweat and wet stone walls hasn't gone away, nor the disturbing noises of those unable to express themselves. But there is a key difference between now and then. He is called TB Rotaru. This man, with his clear, kind, blue eyes and crumpled shirt, was there to meet me, a local lad of just 17. When the first wave of foreigners came, he, TB was roped in as a translator. The volunteers had found their first and most important ally. He went on to Bucharest, then Germany and Holland to study psychology before eventually moving back to Suret and taking over responsibility for the orphans. It is this unassuming man who has turned a small community, once scarred by a legacy of child abuse, into an oasis of tolerance. The young adults now wander freely about the town. They sweep the church steps, catch cigarettes and laugh with the locals. You can spot the ones from the hospital. They are smaller than everyone else. Even the abled bodied are hunched despite their tender years. They have haggard faces and their stumbling gait gives away the horror story that was their childhood. TB shakes his head. Their lives were stolen from them, he tells me, and still they don't have what they need. His young adults. And make no mistake, they are his. To watch him with them is to watch a father with an unruly, loving brood. They now have a bright, shiny new home to move into. The undignified rows of beds will at last be history. Of course, T B reminds us. This building has been ready for over a year. Sitting empty, he knowingly points to his crow's feet. I have travelled fortnightly to Bucharest in the hope of meeting a minister. A lot of funds have been invested in this project, he said, but still they couldn't find the money for a boiler. HE LAUGHS how can I move? The young people into a place with no heating. But TB has the patience of a man born into a system he knows he must work with, not against. Surrette's young adults have now been told their new house will finally have heating and hot water in a town where the winter temperature drops to minus 30 degrees Celsius. TB has once again proved that dreams can come true, so long as you're prepared to wait 23 years.
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Tessa Dunlop in Romania Lebanon is now playing host to more than half a million refugees from the war in Syria, and like other countries bordering Syria, it's struggling to cope. This week, Waal Abu Faw, a senior member of the government in Beirut, accused the Syrian president of ethnically cleansing Sunni Muslims and pushing them south across the border into his country. But Shiite Muslim families have also been displaced, and as Sakhar Al Maqdi has been discovering, some of them are finding a warm welcome in Lebanese communities loyal to the militant Hezbollah group.
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We were so scared in Syria when we arrived in Lebanon there was no more fear, says refugee Faisal Khair Eddine. But now I'm worried the Syrian war is spreading. When rockets fired by Syrian rebels started landing in the Lebanese town of Hermel, he was convinced the war had followed him across the border because he'd fled here from Homs. At the start of the revolution, armed groups started popping up in our neighbourhood. There was random shooting. We knew we had to leave, he says. Hermel is a Lebanese provincial capital. It's just across the border from the war ravaged Syrian town of Qusayr. It's a Hezbollah stronghold. In the town centre, there are posters of Hassan Nasrallah, the group's leader, and President Assad standing side by side. The first rocket to hit Hermel landed just a few meters away from the party's local headquarters. Whatever its intended target, officials claim the missile narrowly missed a wedding party. The barrage is widely thought to have been revenge for the militant group's decision to send men into Syria to fight along Bashar Al Assad's army. While Hezbollah fighting men cross into Syria from Lebanon, refugees flow in the opposite direction. The ones who arrive in Hermel, who are mostly Shia, Khair Ad Din claims, are given a flat and $250 a month by the party, the Lebanese state. The officials, they didn't do anything for us. Hezbollah were the only ones who supported us, he says. While rival Lebanese parties send arms and fighters to the Syrian regime or to the rebels, the Beirut government has stuck to its so called disassociation policy. Politicians of all shades fear that Syrian refugees, the majority of whom are Sunni, will upset Lebanon's jealously protected sectarian balance. Some are eager to make life as difficult as possible for the Syrians. In some towns, nightly curfews have been imposed. Some MPs have proposed closing the borders and the government has refused to allow the UN to build refugee camps. The authorities hands off approach has allowed the refugee situation to become polarized with Shia refugees welcomed by Shia Hezbollah. 1,200 families are thought to be in Hermel and the surrounding villages, including Khair Ad Din's extended family. And they're all receiving cash from the Iranian backed group. They're the lucky ones. An hour south of Hermel is Chitura. Hidden behind a warehouse is a strip of farmland. A rubbish filled stream trickles through the site and a goat wanders between the shelters. This self built refugee camp is home to 200 families. The sides of the shelters are made out of discarded packaging and what looks like advertising billboards. There's not enough material to cover the floor, so the families are sleeping on rough, uneven ground. Dozens squeeze into each shack. They're surviving on a diet of potato and grain. We're only living because death didn't come to us yet, says Sihab Assad, holding her son in her arms. We've run out of food. If you've got connections, you get help. She shrugs. If not, no one will help. With no ties to any political parties, Assad and her family are forced to fend for themselves as night falls. Three men are still hurriedly hammering together planks of wood as they build another shelter before the camp descends into total darkness. New people arrive every night. One of the men tells me. These farm workers and their wives, mainly from Aleppo, have to pay for the privilege of this awful existence. A local farmer charges each family $350 for their plot of land. As more refugees arrive, the food and the money is running out. The local council gives us toothbrushes, says Ziaed Abd al Rahman Al Akra. We can't eat that. We need food and clothes. The children are covered in boils, a symptom, Asad tells me, of drinking dirty water. The refugees dug a well, which she says a three year old boy from another family drowned in. Some of the men have tried day laboring, but Al Akra tells me they've been beaten up by Lebanese workers fearful of the competition. Now we're even scared to go out in the mornings in case someone comes and sets fire to our shelters. The government in Beirut buries its head in the sand because to do otherwise would be to take sides. As the sun sets, we sit on the grass drinking tea. We were not poor, we had lives in Syria, says Alacran. We just want to be treated with dignity.
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And that's Saka al Makadee. California was once home to numerous Native American tribes. Between them, they spoke something like a hundred different languages. Many are still in use today. But the elders, the ones fluent in those tongues, are dying. And with them, some of the links to a distinctive traditional way of life. Many of their young people want to be part of modern America and its infectious culture and philosophy is changing traditional Native American ways. The biggest tribe in the state is the Yurok, and they are determined their traditions shouldn't be lost. They share their territory, if you believe the folklore. With that much talked about but little seen creature, Bigfoot Alistair Leithhead's been travelling the redwood lined roads in the far north of California to see how centuries of language and tradition are being revived
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in the long open stretch of Californian shoreline north of San Francisco. The tallest trees on the planet tower over the hills and river valleys of the Pacific Ocean coast. Their imposing trunks with red tinged deep coursed bark glow out of the misty undergrowth. Their size hard to comprehend. The road names are inspiring. Avenue of the Giants Redwood highway. The Bigfoot Scenic Byway. A few redwoods have been cut so tourists can drive their cars through them, but most are now protected in a string of state parks and national forests. In 1850, as the gold rush was bringing determined opportunists to the land, there were millions of these ancient trees. As the gold ran out, the miners moved into logging. The ancient giants fell. But still, some redwoods are more than a thousand years old and they grew up alongside an amazing diversity of Native American tribes. California's isolation, sandwiched between the ocean and the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada and its ecological riches provided ample space to forest Indians, desert tribes, mountain hunters, coastal fishers, and along the Klamath river to the Yurok people, who are now the largest remaining Native American tribe in California. When the white man came and cut down the trees, they also brought disease that decimated the Indians. That was barely 160 years ago, but mixing and intermarrying happened fast. One reason given for the tribe's survival is the marriage of an army commander to a local girl and the protection that provided. Carol Lewis is leading the charge to revive their language. It was nearly lost in the so called Indian boarding schools which banned indigenous talk and forced English upon the Native American children. There's no mobile phone signal here. So Carol carefully explained how we should get to our meeting place at one end of this huge reservation by the river. We were to visit their primary school. At this school, in an ironic reversal of history, the children can only speak Yurok for at least half of the school day. Neatness, neatness, the teacher said again and again. It means look. She held up leaves and the children repeated Parrot Fashion, their ancient names, but in many ways they seemed like any other modern American youngsters. They fought over a basketball at playtime, dressed as kids would anywhere in the US but the first thing that gave away the centuries, the millennia of history here were the three black striped tattoos running vertically on the young teacher's chin, two from the corners of her mouth, one down the middle. Margot Robbins, who demonstrated how to make the traditional staple of acorn soup, also had one. The small blonde girl watching the stones being heated in the fire and then dropped into the cooking basket, instantly bringing the crushed, leached, and soaked acorn powder to the boil, seemed to have very little Native American about her. But Presley, as she's called, is very much a Yurok girl. It was time for the music. Jim McQuillan's drum reflected in his sharp sunglasses and as he popped on his trendy pork pie hat and bowed to my request for a display of culture as we waited for the freshly caught salmon to grill on the open fire. No headdressers or feathers here, just a small group of people with very Western names. But then the men at first started to sing a deep chant with the unmistakable Native American rhythm and sound. And then the women. Their songs are considered gifts from others or from the spirits who place them in their heads. To sing another person's song without permission is like stealing their soul. We were fortunate to hear them. They don't often share their music with the outside world. There's poverty on this reservation and high unemployment. The tribe does employ some people to teach language, to conserve what's left of the culture. There's a communal company which sells the salmon they catch. Tens of thousands of them are brought ashore come spawning time in the late summer. They're building a hotel and casino with a recent government payout. It's a fine for the ways their lands in trust were mismanaged. They are ancient people in modern America. Neatness, neatness, the teacher said again, holding up a picture. Chiki, the class repeated enthusiastically when they saw it. They didn't traditionally have chickens in this valley, so there's no old name for them. There is, however, an ancient name for those towering trees which remain in dwindling numbers, standing proud.
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Alistair Leithead with the Yurok people in California. The world leaders who were in Northern Ireland earlier this week will have their own ideas about how successful the G8 gathering was. They did reach some agreement on improving tax compliance by multinational corporations and on stamping out ransom payments to kidnappers. It's less clear what real progress was made in finding a satisfactory way forward in Syria. But as Andy Martin of our Belfast staff now tells us, from a security point of view at least, the event was an unqualified success.
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The journalists around our dinner table looked at one another knowingly as blue flashing lights rocked back and forth down a bumpy path towards the isolated cottage our team had taken as a base. It was as close as we could get to the security fence that sealed off the island resort where the world's leaders were staying. Here we go. Their faces seemed to say. The police. Checking what we're up to. A colleague opened the door. I don't suppose you've lost your donkeys? Inquired an English police officer. He and his colleagues were in the middle of a 16 hour shift, guarding rural routes around the venue. But the only fence breach had been by a collection of asses who had no apparent political agenda. It set the tone, really, for what must have been one of the most peaceful G8 gatherings in history. More than three and a half thousand police officers were drafted in from England and Wales, and for the first time in as long as anyone can remember, there were more unarmed police on the streets than there were those with guns. The visiting officers were relentlessly patient and friendly, greeting every single person as they passed the seemingly endless line of black boiler suited riot teams in Enniskillen, a town between two lochs. They guarded the bridges around the clock. On Sunday, a major Gaelic football match went ahead as scheduled. Madness, much of the media determined, holding a game in the middle of the biggest security operation in Western Europe. Go ahead. It did. However, the result was that dozens of drunks bored the poor policemen and women with tales of Fermanagh long into the balmy night. I heard one young man tell the same story to three. Three different officers as he weaved his way like a sailmaker's stitch from one hostelry to another. It seemed that Fermanag folk were keen to show off their forgotten town, to talk about its beautiful lakes and islands, to make recommendations as to where the visitors might get a good pint or a decent breakfast. A protest parade set off in the sunshine on Monday evening, intent on getting as close as it could to the summit venue, environmentalists joined socialists and anarchists, dissident Republicans and journalists in a merry march out of town. They were watched all along the rural route by families, babies and buggies, a couple of helicopters and at least a thousand police officers in flak jackets. In the middle of it all was a local superintendent with 30 years service. His job, he joked, was to lead the plo, the protest liaison officers. He'd spent his weekends bringing cups of coffee to a rather forlorn gathering of activists at an encampment designed to send a message to the world's leaders that the G8 was not welcome. Only four tents had been pitched, though, and one of those was by a couple of Danish tourists who hadn't realized the G8 was on at all. A handful of the thousand protesters managed to push down a section of fence, and a black antline of officers immediately appeared from a hollow ahead of them. As far as the eye could see, there were riot police in the field, standing eerily still. Do not breach the hedge, they were told via loud hailer. Nobody even tried. They chanted for a while the usual insults that some Irish republicans aim at the police, but their hearts weren't really in it. The day had been nice. The police had been calm and quiet, but plentiful. And as one of the organizers pointed out with his own loud hiller, the buses back to Belfast would be leaving shortly. You can't just leave us out here, you traitor. One exasperated young revolutionary complained. But the crowd was already moving off. There was, though, time for one unusual gesture. The local superintendent was approached by a known republican from an organization determined to keep Northern Ireland's conflict alive. The man offered the superintendent his hand. They shook, leaving the policeman rather stunned. It just shows you, he said afterwards. If there's a bit of give and take, people react well to that. Go in hard and they come back hard. The police that have come to help have been cheerful and excited to be a part of this event. There has been no shortage of banter and wind ups between the various police forces and the good humour has been passed on to the protesters and the people of Enniskillen. It has all in its own way, been rather disarming.
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Andy Martin on the shores of Loughne in County For Manor, bringing another edition to a close. There'll be more from our own correspondence on Saturday morning at half past eleven. I hope you'll join us then. Goodbye.