← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Don't Call it a Drone!
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Reporters worldwide. In this edition: Britain and France are to co-operate on a new -...
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This is a download from the BBC.
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It's the latest edition of From Our
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Own Correspondent, broadcast on Radio 4, and it's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Hello. Today, don't call it a drone. Britain and France agree to build their own unmanned aircraft, but that name's causing problems. Recovery. What? Recovery. In the textile factories of Work street in Athens, they expect the hard times to continue. A warlord who says women shouldn't climb mountains wants to be Afghanistan's next president. And we're off to the Car Horn bazaar in Old Delhi to find the honk which can drown out all others on India's cacophonous roads. So, the first round of the Syria peace talks ended in Geneva yesterday with little sign of any headway. The Syrian government and opposition are clearly still deeply divided over key issues such as the ending of violence, sharing political power and allowing humanitarian aid into areas under siege. But the UN mediator chairing the talks is hopeful that progress can be made in the second round of discussions, which are due to begin in 10 days time. Lakhtar Brahimi says that he thinks the break will give both sides space to consider more productive approaches and give their backers, notably the U.S. and Russia, time to exert their influence. So was anything achieved at these talks? Bridget Kendall is just back from Geneva.
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On the once green but now muddy lawn in front of the imposing neoclassical colossus that is the UN headquarters in Geneva, a forest of white pavilions stretched along the curb like a caravan encampment in the desert. As the morning sky lightened and the ethereal snow capped peaks of the Alps across Lake Geneva became visible, a small gaggle of acolytes accompanying a Syrian government minister made its way across the tarmac. Almost immediately, it was mobbed by journalists. The questions fired at the Damascus official, an adviser to President Assad no less, were pointed and often hostile. Many were from fellow Syrians, including journalists sympathetic to the opposition. The Assad advisor maintained a steely composure, driving home her arguments in fluent English. But when she was challenged on camera in Arabic, she looked uncomfortable. It's easy to dismiss these Geneva talks as worthless. The only agreements between the two rival delegations, it seems, were to face each other across a table but not talk directly. Hold a minute. Long silence for serious victims and concede that terrorism is a problem while blaming each other for causing it. So what was the point then of this expensive circus? Well, even if it's hard to identify any substantial progress, it could still be that this Geneva process, if it's allowed to continue, is sowing A seed which has the potential to change something. For a start, not just rival Syrian delegations were thrown together. So were rival Syrian journalists. For a week, they jostled in crowded press conferences and at their TV stand up positions. Once or twice, tempers frayed and there was nearly a punch up. But sometimes encounters were more promising. I felt good about myself that I could ask the opposition spokesman a question and not hate him, confessed one state TV journalist from Damascus, speaking in confidence. Then there was the noticeable shift in the power play between the two delegations. The Assad team arrived looking assured and contemptuous of the so called opposition, as they called them. And it's true, when the squad of Syrian National Coalition delegates first flew in from Istanbul, they looked shambolic. But within 24 hours of arrival, their fortunes seemed to improve, even though they represented only a depleted fraction of Syria's opposition and almost none of its rebel fighters. From low expectations, the Geneva talks gave them status and parity with their opponents and an ambition to improve their own credibility. Every evening in back rooms at the Intercontinental Hotel, they would confer with their Western media advisors, shaping messages to put out on social media and press briefings, coordinating policy. When Damascus tries to provoke us, we try to be calm and dignified, one female delegate told me proudly. It didn't always work on everybody. At one press conference, the opposition pushed the line that President Assad was in a marriage of convenience with the most extremist of the jihadist militant groups, isis. Half the room scribbled notes. Half Syrian state journalists listened in hostile silence. Behind me, two Russian journalists were also skeptical. Chistea propaganda, one whispered to the other in Russian. Pure propaganda. But as it became clear this peace process was also a battle to shape public opinion, the Assad delegation began to look more uncertain. No longer were they in Damascus, in a state controlled bubble. This was neutral ground. And they were caught in the headlights of a global media onslaught. Not only President Assad's opinion mattered anymore. How they conducted themselves was being measured by everyone. I've just been on the phone to Damascus, one Syrian colleague said. Everyone's following TV and is hoping what is happening in Geneva can change something. No wonder neither delegation was prepared to walk out in protest. Neither wanted to be blamed for the collapse of the talks. The question now is whether this process, political, diplomatic and psychological, will be allowed to continue. Will President Assad want to send his delegation back for more? We don't know yet. At their final press conference of this round, Syrian government ministers turned up en masse, as though needing the reinforcement of each other. They did not commit to returning to Geneva. They denied they were under any pressure from Russia to keep talking. But if they do come back, don't entirely write off this process as irrelevant.
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Bridget Kendall, now back from the talks in Geneva. The election campaign to find a successor to President Hamid Karzai officially got underway this morning. If it's completed without bloodshed, it will be the first time since 1901 that there has been a peaceful handover of power in Afghanistan. But a number of candidates standing for the post of president or vice president may be tainted by their involvement in the country's violent past. The most prominent of them, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, was named in the official U.S. inquiry into 911 as the mentor of the man who masterminded the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. David Loyne has been to Mr. Sayyaf's home in the mountains west of Kabul to meet him.
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I last saw Abdul Ras Al Sayyaf in action as a commander just after the Taliban were forced out of power in 2001. I was on my way into Kabul after witnessing the defeat of the Taliban in Bamiyan, where they destroyed the giant Buddha statues carved in into the Hindu Kush 1300 years before, surviving Taliban fighters were scattered and frightened. Walking into Kabul, I'd come across a group who were trying to surrender. They wanted to negotiate. The following morning, I returned to see if I could make contact with them again and saw the distinctive figure of Sayaf bringing up artillery to make it clear there would be no negotiations. Decisive, ruthless and very well connected, he led one of the most fundamentalist of the guerrilla bands fighting against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. A religious scholar, educated and radicalized in Egypt, he took the lion's share of the Saudi money that flowed through Pakistan across the northwest frontier to pay for the war. It's not surprising that when thousands of Arabs were attracted to fighting the jihad, most flocked to his banner, among them Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who planned the 911 attacks on the US. When I met him in his home in Pagman, a former royal retreat in the mountains west of Kabul, he didn't deny that he'd met Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Osama Bin Laden or, he told me, people who were even bigger than them. Wearing traditional dress and a turban and with a long white beard, he has an easy manner and sat good humouredly, batting away my questions, speaking English clearly and deliberately. Sayaf is an assumed nom de guerre, meaning sword bearer, and in his honour, it was adopted by an Al Qaeda affiliate in Indonesia. Calling itself Abu or son of Sayyaf. But his role in inspiring men who became international terrorists is not the most controversial thing about him. More troubling, perhaps, is what came after the defeat of Soviet forces in 1989, when the government the Soviet Union had imposed fell. Three years later, commanders like Sayaf fought among themselves in a bloody civil war that caused more damage to Kabul than any fighting before or since, only ending when the Taliban came to power. Sayaf has been named in a number of independent inquiries for his part in human rights abuses committed during the civil war years, in particular, a massacre at Afshar in Kabul in 1993. When hundreds died and there was mass rape, the killers went house to house, leaving no one alive. Sayyaf denied involvement in this. But the allegations of abuses committed during the civil war, like the Afshar massacre, have not come under public scrutiny in Afghanistan, where former warlords wield enormous power and suppress the results of a major investigation into the crimes of the past. So what kind of a president would Sayaf make? He'd be tough on law and order standing for a traditional Afghan conservatism. His party symbol is an oil lamp, an avowedly anti modern device. I asked him if he supported rights for women in the Western sense. There have been fragile gains for women since the fall of the Taliban, but this is far from an equal society. Interestingly, this was the only time in a long conversation when Sayyaf specifically invoked Islam to explain his position in Islam, he said women were given great respect as childbearers. He said his government would give all the rights which Islam has given to women. This would include access to education and the right to work, but it would be restricted in an Afghanistan led by this old warlord. Women would not be allowed to study engineering, for example, because this is not what they were created for and it was important they did not carry heavy things. And in an obscure attempt to illustrate his concern and limit the ambitions of women, he said they should not go to the top of mountains. He said that the question of his involvement in war crimes in the past would be decided by the Afghan people in the election, saying that if he were elected, then that would mean they loved him, but if they refused him, then that would mean the allegations against him were true.
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David Loyne Economic recovery is gathering pace in Greece. According to the country's finance ministry, this week it forecast a budget surplus for 2013, a year ahead of schedule. Retail sales are up as well for the first time in nearly four years. Yet for those trying to do business Amid the long years of recession and the intensive government programme of belt tightening, this alleged recovery is hard to detect. Nevertheless, as Maria Margarones has been finding out in the capital Athens, Greeks are experienced at weathering storms and often doing it in style.
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Meraiki is an untranslatable Greek word. It means pleasure and pride and skill all rolled into one. If you do something with meraiki, you put a piece of your soul in it. Whether it's making soup or painting a masterpiece, craftsmen often have it. Bureaucrats, not so much. Costas and Alekos Melidis have meraki in spades. Their small textile factory is on Odos Ergacias Work street in Neao Nia, a formerly industrial Athens suburb. Work street is lined with Seville orange trees, which in midwinter are still bright with fruit. But most of the low buildings now have broken windows, gap toothed tiles, graffiti covered walls. Not this one. I first pushed open the steel door almost two years ago, drawn by the train track clacking of the looms. A faded and frayed Greek flag hung from a beam above me, flanked by bolts of cotton taller than two men. On the floor stood boxes of cream coloured bobbins. A rectangle of sun poured down from a skylight onto a metal loom where two men were folding a freshly woven blanket. Everything was dusted with a snow of cotton fluff as soft as rabbit's fur. In the small front office, a pair of caged canaries trilled ecstatically while Costas and Alekos told me their family's story. Like many in Neonia, their parents came from asia Minor after 1922, when the Greco Turkish War and Population Exchange displaced 1 1/2 million Greeks. The refugees brought their distinctive culture and new skills with them. By the 1930s, Neonia was a thriving textile town and a stronghold of the left, known in its heyday as the Manchester of Greece. Costas and Aleko's father designed and built his first loom in 1950, wooden but driven by an electric motor. The brothers opened the factory in 1976. By the mid-80s they had five workers running seven looms, three shifts, six days a week. Work street was full of similar enterprises. Now there are only three. I went back to visit Alequos and Costas again this winter, afraid that after two more years of crisis I would find the front door locked. But there they were, exactly as before, making the waffle weave blankets I remember from my childhood and sheets for babies, cribs with little dots woven in and a new light brown herringbone They've named the Tiger. Things are tough, of course. Sales are down more than 60%. They've let go all their staff and work, only two of the looms. They blame globalization and government's failure to protect Greek industry and the endless bureaucracy that thwarts small businesses and the tax system that keeps changing, and the corrupt politicians from all parties who are never punished. But they don't rant or raise their voices. They're gentle and dignified and determined to carry on. Neo Nia has been hit hard by the crisis, but it hasn't forgotten its heritage. Leaving the factory, I met a man cracking walnuts in the neat front yard of the house where he was born in 1925. It was one of the stone shacks built to house the refugees, a small room for living and sleeping and a corridor for cooking with a miniature tiled sink. He said he'd picked the nuts the day before on Mount Olympus, where he'd fought with the Left Resistance in the Axis occupation and the civil war that followed. Afterwards he'd spent eight years in prison for his pains. As we prized the meat from the damp shells together, I asked him how he was coping. I've seen hunger before. He smiled and it's going to get worse. But I know where to find greens and snails and I'll survive. Down the road, the old Textile Weavers association hall is a food bank now, set up by the local council and staffed by volunteers who are often also clients. Two years ago it was supporting 200 families. Now it serves 800. White Haired Kyrgyz Dimitris showed me what goes into each blue plastic bag. Write this down, he insisted. Pulses, pasta, tomato paste, condensed milk, marmalade, oil, sugar, flour and rice. Enough for 30 days. He has meraki too. When I got home as instructed, I opened the Melides brothers parting gift to me. It was a waffle weave tea towel printed with an old 20,000 drachma note.
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And that was Miriamis now. President Hollande's complicated private life probably didn't get much of a mention at the meeting he had yesterday with David Cameron at RAF Bryson Orton. There was still plenty to talk about with the Prime Minister apparently keener than his French guests to renegotiate EU treaties. And there were deals to announce on nuclear power, science and space cooperation and defence projects. They include a 120 million pound scheme to develop an Anglo French combat drone. These unmanned aircraft are now in regular use in places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. But Owen Bennett Jones points out that even if there are more and more of them, the use of that word drone is proving controversial.
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At the moment, only the us, the UK and Israel are using armed drones. But many others are building them because they bring new capabilities. Take as an example this story I heard on a trip to Pakistan last year. An Arab militant used to sleep in the same room as his wife and children in one of Pakistan's tribal areas. And one night, four or five Punjabi militants came seeking shelter. The Arab let them in and decided to sit and talk with them, and he ended up sleeping in the same room as them. That night, a drone hit his compound, killing all the militants and leaving the wife and children alive. Can the Americans tell which room someone's sleeping in and who else is in there? And can they really be so accurate as to hit one bedroom and not another? I can say this. Numerous officials and journalists in Peshawar, and of course many US military officers, believe the drones are very accurate. A tribal leader told me another story. Some Talibs were in the open space of a compound right by a room in which they were holding 18 hostages for ransom. The kidnapping business is an important source of Taliban funding. The drone hit the compound and killed all the militants, and it also damaged the wall of the prison room to such an extent that the hostages were all able to walk away unharmed. It was an outcome the local people described as evidence of the greatness of God. Drones clearly kill civilians too, although that may be down to targeters making mistakes rather than technological error. But in any event, drones are here to stay, and countries with global military ambitions, such as France and the uk, will, would like to develop their own drone technology. But there is a tricky issue ahead. What are they going to call the machines they make? As anyone working in public relations knows, if you control the language, you're halfway to defining an issue. It's the reason journalists get caught up in so many apparently arcane disputes. Is that construction between Israel and the West Bank a security fence or a wall? Was Iraq invaded or, as US officials insisted in the early days, liberated? Is it military spending or defence expenditure? And of course, is that man with a gun a terrorist or a freedom fighter? And so it is with drones and various alternatives. But first, the word drone itself. Well, apparently the contemporary use of the word drone can be traced back over 75 years to the development of a plane called the Queen Bee. The UK government wanted an inexpensive, expendable, radio controlled target for anti aircraft gunnery practice. And According to the October 1935 edition of the US journal Popular Mechanics, the Queen Bee operated perfectly under remote control within a radius of 10 miles from the aerodrome. And so it went. Starting with the remote controlled queen bee and perhaps influenced by the constant sound of the engine, you end up with a drone. But the word also has connotations related to male worker bees. Drones are generally considered rather mindless creatures, which takes us to the possible implication that the weapons systems are mindless. Not just mindless, of course, but mindless killers. Which is presumably why the leading manufacturer of drones, a Californian based company called General Atomics, recently complained to the UK's Defence Select Committee that the word drone has pejorative connotations. The company, however, was really not best placed to make the complaint. After all, it calls its two main models the Predator and the Reaper. But what is the alternative? Well, there's unmanned aerial vehicle, uav, but some military officers say that doesn't fully capture the amount of personnel and systems involved in the operations and decision making process. So they prefer unmanned aerial system. But again, that doesn't show that humans are involved in the process of directing the weapons. And so they've come up with the currently favoured remotely piloted aircraft. RPA drone manufacturers, their customers and like minded individuals are now quite dogged in not using the word drone. But just this week they faced a significant setback. President Obama, in his State of the Union address, said he was keen to limit the use of drones. And if the Commander in Chief calls them drones, then it's really quite difficult for his subordinates and even his suppliers to say he's wrong.
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Owen Bennett Jones. There now, noisiest city in the world is not a title greatly coveted, and the list of contenders is mostly rather predictable. Much of that racket, of course, comes from the streets. Car alarms, traffic noise, motorbikes. Karachi and Cairo among the worst offenders, where the decibel level soars up beyond 80 and into the earplug zone. Several Japanese cities, including Tokyo and Nagasaki are up there. New York City as well. But it seems Indian cities occupy the top three positions in this particular chart. At number three, that teeming eastern metropolis, Calcutta. Bombay, as we used to call it, is the country's most populous city. It's at number two and top of the tree, the noisy number one. It's India's capital, Delhi. But now there's an attempt to quieten it down. As Anu Anand's been finding out, I'm
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lucky to live on a cul de sac in New Delhi. My day begins with green parakeets squawking as they play in the trees. A temple bell chimes, A fruit seller rolls his push cart Past custard, apples, guavas, papaya. I miss these sounds when I wake up in London, where it often feels as quiet as a morgue. But for most Delhi residents, these pleasant sounds are drowned out each day by the traffic roaring past their homes. Seven million cars, more than in India's three other major cities combined, jostle for space on Delhi's roads. Besides the revving of engines and squealing of brakes, eardrums are hammered by the continuous blast of automobile horns at intersections. Impatient drivers eager to turn right use all lanes, blocking those wishing to go straight, naturally instigating loud outbursts of anger. Instead of slowing down while turning or approaching an intersection, drivers will blast their horns to warn others of their presence. They also honk at bicyclists, pedestrians, children, dogs, cows and anyone else unfortunate enough to be slower than them. Less than a split second after a traffic signal turns green, the assault begins afresh, as if the sheer force of the decibels will push cars forward. Often the smallest vehicles are the noisiest. Kamikaze motorbikes and scooters weave dangerously through traffic, popping out unexpectedly from your blind spot as they emit a violent buzz. After dark, the pressurized air horns of lorries blast their strident musical tunes as they race down empty roads closed to them during the day. Millions of vehicle horns are bad enough, but then consider that they are drastically louder than the ones sold in Europe or the United States. I went in search of the Horn Bazaar in Old Delhi one day. Amidst the crumbling facades of 16th century havelis, I found the oddest assortment of car parts for sale. Metal suspension springs as tall as buses. Mountains of spare headlights, wing mirrors, seats and even whole chassis blocked the pavement. One street was dedicated entirely to horns. I found a shop where the keeper proudly displayed a large selection. I asked which was the loudest. He pressed a buzzer without warning. My eardrums felt pierced by the blast. I staggered backwards, covering my ears, astonished at how a sound could physically hurt. At 118 decibels, it was equivalent to a thunderclap. My ears throbbed for two days. And yet, the shopkeeper explained, drivers come especially to replace their inbuilt horns with these much louder ones. People here just won't move out of the way unless you've got a really loud horn, he said. Honking is illegal near schools, hospitals and at intersections in Delhi, but hardly anyone complies. As a result, noise pollution has become so intense, it's having a measurable impact on people's health, a recent study showed. Not only is it affecting school children and hospital patients. It's contributing to increased stress and heart disease and causing the onset of age related deafness 15 years earlier than normal. The problem is so bad, one man is resorting to guerrilla tactics to educate drivers. For the past five years, Delhi resident Ravi Kalra and his band of volunteers have been stopping traffic, lecturing drivers and slapping cars with stickers that say do not honk. The morning I visit him, people honk at the volunteers for causing delays. He says he often.