← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Donald Trump and a dangerous ultimatum
00:28:33
The US president made extraordinary threats towards Iran, but the war is far from over
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Johnny Diamond
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BBC Narrator/Presenter
Hello. Today we're in Kyiv, where our correspondent discovers how the war has reshaped the city in the four years since he last went home. Albania's pristine coastline is prime real estate for the tourism industry, and the Trump family has big plans. We go snorkeling in a coral reef in Indonesia, a once idyllic experience increasingly spoiled by the growing piles of plastic waste. And finally, in Morocco, we join the indigenous Amazigh people to celebrate the new year of 2976. But first, citizens of Iran and nearby Gulf countries held their breath this week after President Donald Trump threatened a whole civilization would die if a ceasefire wasn't agreed by Tuesday evening. At the 11th hour, news came through that an agreement had been reached, though there were conflicting reports from the US And Iran over what that really meant. But peace talks are going ahead in Pakistan this weekend. Tom Bateman, the BBC State Department correspondent, has been following events from Washington and the proclamations of an increasingly unpredictable commander in Chief.
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Pentagon Correspondent
All wars are also propaganda wars, and in this one, the information blitz has felt close up inside the beating heart of American military power. Since the first week of the conflict, I've been attending the Pentagon news briefings given by Pete Hegseth, the former National Guard major turned Fox Fox News pundit turned Trump appointed US Secretary of Defense, a job rebranded by the president to the Secretary of War. The briefings take place first thing in the morning, lest they interfere with the President's daily, sometimes hourly appearances in front of the media at the White House, a 6:30am arrival at the Pentagon ready to be wristbanded and badged and put into a seat with your name on it. These events have been highly choreographed and controlled by Mr. Hegseth's press and security. People for front row seats and questions are nearly always prioritized for media outlets who have signed up to a restrictive set of conditions which bar reporters from seeking any information in the Pentagon that has not been officially authorized. These rules have been struck down by a judge as unconstitutional, but the Pentagon has yet to comply, and Mr. Hegseth tends to favor outlets that give favorable coverage to the administration. The news conferences are routinely frustrating as he takes few questions, mostly deliberately avoiding reporters who might ask something tough or challenging. This week, I wanted to ask about the extraordinary threats the commander in chief made, the likes of which have been unthinkable from a US president in at least the post World War II era. Mr. Trump threatened to destroy all of Iran's bridges and power plants if the regime didn't do a deal. His expletive filled Easter Sunday Post demanded Tehran open the strait. Two days later, he said a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. Outrage flowed from many, including the president's political opponents. Some Democrat lawmakers said his civilization ending statement showed genocidal intent. One of them, Jim McGovern, also said the US military was required to disobey any and all illegal orders. They said the ultimatum to bomb all bridges and power plants if acted on would likely amount to war crimes. Was the president concerned about that allegation? Not at all, he said at a press briefing back at the Pentagon. I wanted to ask Mr. Hegseth and the man standing next to him, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, general Dan Kane, if they would have been ready to direct the US Military to carry out the threatened actions. I didn't get called on. But one reporter did ask more broadly about President Trump's power plant threats. Mr. Hegseth said the US had had a target set locked and loaded and could strike those things with impunity. I was struck by the ease with which he used those words. His statement was not true. Laws passed by the US Congress limit war powers of the executive. Similarly, Mr. Hegseth said at an earlier briefing that no quarter would be given for enemies. In international law, it is prohibited to give orders of no quarter, which means you refuse to spare the lives of anyone, even the wounded or those who surrender. The line went barely noticed in the room, but was soon picked up with growing condemnation online and on social media. Days later, the head of the US army, general Randy George, took early retirement, widely seen as him being pushed out by Mr. Hegseth, the latest in a long line of removals as the secretary of defense has purged the US Military of what he calls woke rules, politically correct policies and stupid rules of engagement. All of this, say analysts, points to the erosion of the norms of war, a disregard for the international order by the very superpower that for generations took on the global role of policing it. Last week, more than 100 US based experts on international law signed an open letter expressing profound concern about what they saw as serious violations of international law by the US In Iran. They described rhetoric by President Trump and Secretary Hegseth as profoundly alarming and dangerously short sighted. The White House said in response that Mr. Trump was making the region safer through his actions, dismissing what it described as so called experts. Mr. Trump himself said in a newspaper interview earlier this year he didn't need international law, that he was limited only by his own morality. My own mind, he said, is the only thing that can stop me. Perhaps. But the regime in Iran is still proving adept at stopping the US President, too, despite the claims from the White House and the Pentagon, where I attended the last news briefing this week as Mr. Hegseth proclaimed a crushing victory over the Iranians, the regime's leverage by controlling the Strait of Hormuz has become an immobilizing factor for the US President. Other NATO powers and the United nations appear hamstrung as they demand that Iran observes international norms and keeps the strait open. Freedom of navigation and the rules of the free world must be observed, they say. But to many, their demand rings hollow when the leader of the free world himself seems unhindered by the rules as well.
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BBC Narrator/Presenter
Tom Bateman Next to Ukraine, where diplomatic efforts to end the war with Russia have stalled amid the ongoing crisis in Iran, Russia has seen windfall profits from its oil and gas exports as global prices soared. Ukraine has moved to curb this advantage, using drones to strike Russian export terminals. Meanwhile, a UK Intelligence assessment has said the situation of the front line in the east was the most favorable for Ukraine in 10 months. A correspondent, Vitaly Shevchenko, who is originally from Ukraine, recently went back home for the first time in four years.
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Vitaly Shevchenko
I have been away for too long. Four awful, tragic years. On the way to Kyiv, I did not really know what to expect from the country I called home for most of my life. A sense of constant danger, constant fear, or a veneer of normality punctuated by explosions. During my first night, I waited nervously for sounds of menace in the sky where Russian drones and missiles about to blow up. The dark and the quiet none did. Fortunately, the following day revealed a city I'm so familiar with. Streets gridlocked with traffic, cafes packed with people, parents with children playing outside their homes. They don't wait for signs of danger. They've got a life to live, despite everything. But take another look and you see it. The war is everywhere. Strips of sticky tape on windows in case explosions shatter them to lethal shards. Plywood instead of glass. And windows that have already been shattered. Burnt out buildings caved in roofs, concrete security blocks outside government buildings. Anti tank traps made of bits of metal welded together, known as hedgehogs locally. Men and women in military fatigues everywhere. So many young people with missing limbs. One of the most poignant and stark demonstrations of what happened to my country while I was away is a sprawling memorial to fallen soldiers, set up in Independence Square by their friends and relatives. I knew it was there. I had seen pictures of it. And yet it was a shock to experience it in person, to look into the eyes of the hundreds and hundreds of portraits, to walk among the countless flags fluttering in the wind, each representing a life lost. Next to the memorial, there's a sculpture, a line of huge letters spelling out I love Ukraine. This reinvigorated sense of national identity is palpable. And it's all the more cherished because of the tragic shared knowledge of what it costs to defend it. Blue and yellow Ukrainian flags are ubiquitous. And while you still hear lots of people speaking Russian, much more Ukrainian is spoken in Kyiv compared to how I remember it. A sticker I saw on a lamppost spelled out the Ukrainians speak Ukrainian. Russian is the language of the occupier. One evening, I caught up with two of my childhood friends. Russian was pretty much the only language spoken in our school in the eastern city of Zaporizhzhia, now sitting in a bar set up by refugees from the occupied town of Berdyansk, we only spoke Ukrainian. And the nearby Leo Tolstoy Square has been renamed Ukrainian Heroes Square. You can even spot manifestations of national pride in Kyiv's rush hour traffic. Ukrainian at the wheel, said one bumper sticker. The generators that powered Kyiv through the horrible winter of Russian strikes against energy infrastructure are still everywhere in the capital streets, but they are reassuringly silent after damage has been repaired and power supply restored. I left Kyiv to visit the nearby town of Bucha shortly before the fourth anniversary of the mass killing of civilians there by Russian soldiers. It's undergone an amazing transformation. Reverted back into a posh commuter town surrounded by garden centres with almost all signs of their atrocity. Cleaned up, roads resurfaced and swanky new apartment blocks springing up everywhere. Confidence is in the air that Russians are not coming back. Standing in the leafy streets of Bucha. It's so easy to forget that a few hundreds of miles east, they're still destroying village after village, town after town. When we stopped at the roadside cafe on the way back to Kyiv, a black Transit van parked up next to us with the words Evacuation of the fallen soldiers written on its sides. There's just no escaping the war in Ukraine. And yet it was an unusually quiet time in the Ukrainian capital. I didn't hear a single explosion or a Russian drone. I got lucky, but others didn't. During my stay in the country, dozens of civilians were killed and injured in Russian airstrikes. Elsewhere, as my visit to Ukraine came to a close, we drove west to the safety of Poland, where I could catch a flight back to the uk. Along the way, we saw more reminders of the terrible price Ukraine has had to pay. In village cemeteries, no matter how small, there are now sections reserved for soldiers killed in the war, with a flag marking each grave. During my trip, I saw signs of hope and rebirth. But as I was boarding my flight back to London, there was little hope that there would be no new flags in those graveyards.
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BBC Narrator/Presenter
Vitaly Shevchenko Next the white sands and turquoise waters of the Albanian Riviera are catching the eye of global property developers, President Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner among them. The country is being touted as the next must visit destination, but there are concerns over what might be lost should the pristine coastline be taken over by luxury hotel chains. Emily Wither went to find out more.
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Emily Wither
I'm trying to retrace the steps of Ivanka Trump, bumping along a dirt track in a 4x4. The narrow road has a steep drop down to a lagoon on one side and wetlands on the other. It's hard to imagine her taking this exact journey five weeks ago, and I'm now starting to wonder if she might have skipped the road and landed on the narrow beach by private yacht. Instead, I'm here to answer a question. What does the daughter of the President of the United States want with a secluded beach in the Balkans? As we drop down onto the wet sand, a flock of sheep are sunning themselves at the edge of the Adriatic Sea. I'm with Marina and Jerry from Pepania, Albania's first independent environmental group. They record and monitor the wildlife in the area. On our journey here, Jerry has occasionally stopped the car to place a telescope on a tripod and point out some of the local birds. We look on at white egrets and dozens of large, pale pink flamingos resting in the Nata Lagoon. We can find up to 4,000 flamingos here daily, jerry says. And last year we had the first evidence of flamingos breeding. Through the lens, we also catch sight of the hulking outline of an airport being built. While Donald Trump's son in law, Jared Kushner, was in Davos presenting his master plan to turn Gaza into a high rise seaside resort, Ivanka was here discussing coastal developments over lunch with Albania's Prime Minister, Edi Rama. She then came to this beach a few hours from the Albanian capital with a team of architects and surveyors. But the whole visit was shrouded in secrecy, and none of the locals seemed to know what exactly is about to happen here. Albania spent nearly half a century under communist rule, largely cut off from the outside world. So almost by accident, it has great stretches of unspoiled natural beauty, interrupted only by the sight of one of the thousands of Cold War bunkers still studding the hills like large, rusting turtles. And just as the Balkan's coastal landscape is shaped by its past, the country's historic land ownership rules also affect the present day and can make development difficult. Property was nationalized under Communism, then shared out again after its collapse. Villagers in this area are still locked in court cases over who actually owns the land. It's a common legal predicament, especially fraught in areas where land is more valuable and tourism projects are springing up. Marina grew up in Zwinnets. It's just across from the heel of Italy. Now in her 30s, she remembers summers swimming in the sea, eating the fish her father caught on long, sticky nights. She tells me how she would sleep on the cool floor of the local monastery. She now retraces her childhood steps, monitoring sea turtles and monk seals that she took for granted growing up. When she first saw the blueprints for a resort here, she said she knew she had to fight it. The first locals heard American elites were eyeing their slice of paradise was when plans appeared online on the social media pages of Mr. Kushner and his business, Affinity Global. They showed villas dotting the hills of olive groves, hotels with swimming pools shaded by the sand dunes, and a series of jetties for luxury yachts. Those plans align perfectly with the vision of Prime Minister Rama, who once said, what 400 yachts can generate is equal to what can be earned from 40,000 low cost visitors. Tourism has boomed in the country over the last decade, and now Rama wants to tap into the luxury market. The government has changed the rules and allowed some building in protected areas of ecological importance, like the area around Zwenz and has fast tracked big tourism projects if they bring in serious money and create plenty of jobs. Some villagers told us, all the young people have left in search of work. Donnica, in her 70s, whose own children have left, told me, in many aspects, investment is always a good thing. There are no young people here. Maybe this will bring them back. And why shouldn't the Albanian government profit from tourism in the same way their neighbors like Greece and Italy have? Standing here on this untouched coast, you can really see what that vision could bring. But you can also see what it would take away. Gesturing to the pristine landscape around us, Marina says, I know for sure that everyone who wants to come here wants to come for this because they miss it in their own country. But once they come here with cars and to have luxury, this will disappear.
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BBC Narrator/Presenter
Emily Wither and you can hear more on that story on Radio 4's Crossing Continents on BBC Sounds.
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BBC Narrator/Presenter
next to Indonesia, where tourist hotspots and remote beaches alike are being hit by wave after wave of plastic waste. Videos of floating rubbish tips have gone viral and President Prabowo Subianto has been forced to call for action warning that nearly all landf nationwide could reach over capacity by 2028. Rebecca Henschke saw the plastic problem up close.
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Rebecca Henschke
The engine coughs before it catches and we're off. We're travelling in a tiny speedboat crossing from Sumbawa to the island of Moyo. On one side, the open sea that's broken every now and then by flying fish that dart out like silver arrows. And then on the other side, Moyo Island, a wall of green jungle that runs down to strips of white sand. Nearly 70% of the island is now protected forest. Burhan the captain is keen to share his philosophy on life. Money. He shouts above the engine, throwing both arms in the air means nothing. Community, connection to the land, to God. That is everything. He beams at me. He has an excellent smile. I smile back and encourage him to put his hands back on the wheel. I lived and reported in Indonesia for 15 years. But this time I've come back for a holiday, to show my Cornish boyfriend, Ross, the place that shaped me. We've come to Moyo because it's remote, no cars. It has stunning limestone based waterfalls with water so clear it looks lit from within. We pull up at the jetty of a small dive resort. After dropping off our bags, we grab snorkels and dive into the water. Eager for a swim, we kick out and then stop. Around us, there's colour, but not just coral and fish, but floating plastic bottles, bags, crisp packets, tangled packaging. We kick forward, trying to push through it, trying to focus on the reef below. But the plastic stretches on and on. It surrounds us. My boyfriend lifts his mask and looks at me, horrified. I know how the fish feel, he says. The dive resort manager, Andrew, insists it wasn't there yesterday. And by the following morning, it's gone, pulled away by the current. A floating dump. It will wash up on another shore. Now. Nowhere in the Indonesian archipelago is untouched by plastic. Along the coast, they even have a name for this time of year. Muzim Sampa, the rubbish season. When the monsoon rains begin, rivers flush out the tons of plastic dumped into them, out into the sea. It was one of the first stories I covered when I became an Indonesian correspondent. I stood atop a vast rubbish dump on the edge of Jakarta, the city's only landfill. Already struggling to cope. Then I joined a community tourism project offering, optimistically, boat tours along the Chilliwung river every five minutes. The engine stalled. The driver had to lean over the side to pull out fistfuls of plastic, clogging the propeller before we could move again. It was estimated seven football fields of plastic waste was ending up in the river every day. Back then, the government called it a national embarrassment, a crisis. That was a decade ago. It's worse now. Much worse. While we're on Moyo, my social media feed starts filling with videos from Bali. Waves of rubbish crashing onto its famous beaches. One video stops me cold. It's from Alice Paul national park at the far eastern tip of Java. Alice Powo, which translates as the ancient forest or first forest, is considered one of the most mystical places in Java. People come to meditate for days in its caves. But now I'm watching videos labelled Plastic Emergency by the volunteer environmental group Sungai Watch that is now trying to organise a massive clean up of Alice Palwal. 17 kilometres of pristine beach in the national park are being hit with wave after wave of plastic. When I first lived in Indonesia in Yogyakarta as a student in the early 2000s, takeaway rice and vegetables came wrapped in a banana leaf and brown paper. Soft drinks came in glass bottles and you had to return them. The system wasn't perfect, but it was circular. Today, single use bags are handed out for the smallest purchases. Street stalls and mini markets are stacked with plastic sachets, tiny packets of shampoo, coffee, detergent. Affordable, convenient, but almost impossible to recycle. Attempts have been made to charge for plastic bags to turn waste into energy. And the current president Prabowo is talking about the need for action again. But companies profiting hugely from the plastic revolution remain silent. The so called sachet economy has made consumer goods accessible to millions, but at a staggering environmental cost. We catch the slow public boat back from Moyo. The sea is calm and clear. At one point, the largest pod of dolphins I've ever seen follows the boat. They're always in this bay. The man next to me says. In Indonesia, you often move between heaven and hell, sometimes in the very same tide.
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BBC Narrator/Presenter
Rebecca Henschke the Amazigh are North Africa's most populous indigenous group, having inhabited the region for centuries before. Arab migrations in Morocco, around a quarter of the country, speak an Amazigh language. And along with long standing traditional customs, the Amazigh also have their own calendar. Peter Young recently traveled to Morocco's mountain communities where they were celebrating a very different new year.
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Peter Young
After more than a week motorbiking through Morocco's high Atlas mountains, coated this winter in thick snow, I finally arrived at my destination, Thistleday. It was a typical Amazigh mountain village whose spellbinding reddish mud brick homes, clustered together like a giant beehive, blended almost seamlessly with the rugged rocky landscape. But this journey was more about the time than the place. I was here to celebrate the arrival of the year 2976. Regrettably, I had not jumped into a time machine. Here, time was instead flowing. According to the indigenous beliefs, the Amazigh calendar is tied to when their king Shashank took to the throne of Egypt in 950 BC. Different groups celebrate the new year on different dates, but it always falls in January, hence the name Yenaya. And in Tislede, today was that day. Shortly after sundown, as I stretched my sore legs. Residents began to emerge from their homes and set alight a dozen or so small bonfires on the nearby hill slopes. In a huddle down below, bearded men wearing jelloba, the loose hooded gowns ubiquitous in these parts, and women adorned with tricolor silver jewelry started to chant traditional Awash folk songs, and soon afterwards a feast began. Yunaya is a time of being thankful for nature and the way that it provides us with harvests year after year, even up here in the mountains, explained Hamza el Yazid, a local guest house owner, before scooping a huge spoonful of festive tagola porridge into his mouth. We, the Amazigh people, take our connection with the earth very seriously. Back in 2023, or, I suppose,2973, if we're sticking to the Amazigh calendar, Morocco's King Mohammed VI officially declared Yhenaya a national public holiday. It was a move welcomed by rights groups. But critics say that while positive steps have been made in recent years, they have largely been symbolic, and that the government has for decades systematically marginalized the Amazigh community. Rural poverty in Morocco is still stark in the far reaches of the Atlas Mountains. Clean water, decent housing, electricity and proper nutrition are far from guaranteed. Investment in education, healthcare, and roads lags way behind that. In urban areas, some villages are still only accessible by foot, motorbike or donkey. When I met Rashid Raha, founder of the newspaper Le Monde Amazighr, at his office in the capital, Rabat a few weeks before, he summed up the contrast with a dichotomy the useful Morocco and the useless Morocco in the eyes of the authorities. Along the coast, in the major cities, there's been a huge investment in development Casablanca, Rabat, Tangier, Marrakech, said Raha, furling his owlish brow. But in the mountains, in rural areas, the people, the imazing have been left behind. Those claims tallied with what I later saw in the Amazigh village of Agbar. In September 2023, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck Morocco with the epicentre. In this part of the High Atlas Mountains, a heartland of Amazigh culture, it killed over 3,000 people, destroyed or damaged 60,000 homes, and displaced half a million. But more than two years after the tragedy, I saw dozens of families in Akbar still living in temporary plastic tents, at times in sub zero temperatures. Despite the government's pledge to support and provide compensation to all of the victims, life is dark. There's a lot of worries these days. Fadma aitli, Hussain a 27 year old mother of two told me beside her tarpaulin home. We lost everything, she added, pointing to a pile of rubble. That neglect, according to Raha, is symptomatic of deeper inequalities suffered by Morocco's Amazigh citizens today. They remain underrepresented in politics, media and entertainment, he said. Their access to education and healthcare is often poor, and the institutionalization of the Tamazir language has been slower than promised. Yet even the fiercest critics admit the situation has improved from the days when conflict between Amazigh communities and the government regularly turned violent and when Moroccan parents were banned from giving their children Amazigh names. Symbolic though it might be, the image of Yenaya and Amazigh culture being celebrated everywhere from Rabat to Marrakech and Tisal Dei is a powerful one. In the 1980s and 90s, we were not taught about or allowed to be proud of our heritage. We were forced to choose between an Amazigh self and an Arabite self, brahim el Ghwabli, an Amazigh scholar, told me. Now there is more awareness and respect for the multiple identities of Morocco. I can see progress Morocco moving forward.
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BBC Narrator/Presenter
Peter Young and that's all for today. We'll be back again next Saturday morning. Do join us.
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Johnny Diamond
Hello, I'm Johnny diamond and I'm the presenter of the Radio 4 series how did We Get Israel and the Palestinians? We explore the complicated backstory of that Middle east conflict as the region endures another, wider war. Through conversations with experts with a variety of perspectives. We travel back through the centuries to examine the history of the land that's now so contested between Arabs and Israelis. And we try and understand the past that's brought us to such a present. How did we get here? Israel and the Palestinians listen on BBC Sounds.
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