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From Our Own Correspondent
Fasting under Fire
00:28:07
Despatches. In this edition: some of the families caught up in Israel's fight against...
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You have downloaded from our own correspondent. This edition is the latest one broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and here to introduce it is Kate Ady.
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Hello. Today, fasting under fire, the families caught up in Israel's fight against Palestinian militants in Gaza. Out on patrol on the dimly lit streets of Caracas, the city now has the highest murder rate of any capital. Two months to go to the Scottish referendum. So what happened when other nations set out to assert their identities to run their own affairs? And we find out why there are absolutely no women enjoying one of the most spectacular views in all of Greece. After more than a week of fighting between the Israeli military and Palestinian activists, a five hour ceasefire is now in place in Gaza. The Israelis say they agreed to stop firing to allow residents there to stock up and supplies. A spokesman for Hamas confirmed that for the next few hours they would stop launching rockets at Israel. Yesterday, four Palestinian children, all from the the same family, were killed by Israeli artillery fire as they were playing on a Gaza beach. The Israeli authorities said the deaths were a tragic outcome. Their intended targets had been Hamas militants. Yoland Nell in Gaza says families there have been finding it increasingly hard to cope during the violence of the past nine days.
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Haneen's mother sits quietly in her kitchen, rolling out small balls of dough that she fills with ground meat and folds over to make sambusik pastries. These are for her family's iftar, the meal that breaks the daily dawn to dusk fast during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Usually there'd be just one dish in a lavish feast that she'd prepare, but this Ramadan in Gaza is far from normal and food's being managed carefully. This year we really missed Ramadan, Haneen tells me. This should be a joyful time. Instead, the latest round of fierce fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants has driven her, her husband and four children aged from 10 to just three weeks old out of their flat in Gaza City. All of its windows were smashed in Israel's intense air assaults aimed at sites used by militants to launch rockets at its territory. They've been staying with Haneen's relatives for more than a week and have hardly left the house. My kids are very scared, Haneen says. They can't sleep when they hear the sound of the Israeli planes and they refuse to go anywhere without me, even to the bathroom, she tells me. They hardly go to the shops and they don't even go to Tarawih evening prayers for Ramadan because several mosques have been hit. As we drive in the BBC's armored car across Gaza City to Visit Hanin. The streets are deserted. It's like being in a ghost town. The transformation's incredible. Ordinarily, we'd have to weave our way through lines of honking cars and overladen motorbikes. The pavements would be teeming with people. Now most are staying indoors, trying to stay safe. In Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, I watch as farmers drive their horses along the street leading south. One bears his prized dairy cow on the back of a donkey cart. Entire families struggle into the back of pickup trucks with mattresses and carrier bags full of their most precious possessions. A small girl clutches a cage containing two songbirds. Many people seek temporary shelter in schools, turning the classrooms into their makeshift bedrooms. Still fasting, they arrive hot and exhausted. I'm so worried for my grandparents, says 20 year old Ahmed as he searches for a place for them to lie down. I'm young. I can take this. But how can they? God willing, we'll be safe here. And when we get home, our house won't have been destroyed. Like many from Bedlachia, Ahmed has stayed in the school before. There have been three conflicts in five years, and each time his relatives fled here. The situation in Gaza became much tougher for ordinary people after the Islamist movement Hamas took control by force back in 2007, a year after it won legislative elections. Like many other countries, Israel sees Hamas as a terrorist group. It tightened its border restrictions on this coastal enclave, as did Egypt. This strangled the economy and pushed up unemployment. A few hours before Iftar, we find crowds of shoppers buying last minute supplies in Gaza City's Zawiya market. With most stores shutted up, this is one of the only places that groceries can still be bought. But traders here complain that business is far worse than normal. Even before the latest fighting with Israel began, there was a general shortage of cash. Tens of thousands of Hamas public workers haven't been paid. Abu Ahab has a stall selling dates, a Ramadan favorite. It said that the prophet Muhammad himself would eat dates to break his daily fast. The situation's tough this year. We have the siege, a salaries crisis and the war all at the same time. Abu Wahab says Gazans are terrified. They buy just the essentials. Instead of taking a kilo of dates, they take half a kilo. They sell their possessions so they can buy goods for Ramadan. Back at Haneen's family home, there's a loud bang as a Palestinian rocket takes off nearby. Minutes later, the huge thud of an Israeli airstrike shakes the house. We see smoke rising along the road Haneen's daughter shrieks and comes rushing into the room. Haneen is relieved there's due to be a temporary truce for humanitarian reasons, but she agrees with Gaza's militant groups that there must be conditions attached to a longer term truce. We need a ceasefire that will give us our human rights and end the siege, she tells me. We want the Rafah border crossing with Egypt to be opened so that we can travel again. In Gaza. Our children just know about war, about attacks. And she goes on, they should know there's another way to live.
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Yoland Nell now, when your party political broadcast is interrupted by a power cut, then you must know all is not running smoothly in your country. And that's surely the case in Venezuela, where the President Nicolas Maduro was rudely interrupted as he tried to address the nation ahead of his ruling Socialist Party's congress later this month. Venezuela should be a very wealthy country. It has the world's biggest oil reserves, but its economy is a disaster. There's runaway inflation, food shortages and violent anti government protests. It also has one of the world's highest homicide rates. More than 20,000 people have been murdered there in the last 12 months and many thousands more kidnapped. Mike Thompson has been out with the police in the capital, Caracas.
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It's not usual on joining a routine police patrol through one of the world's capital cities to have to don a flak jacket and helmet. But then, Venezuela's Caracas is no ordinary city. Even without the recent violent anti government street protests, this is a very dangerous place. To give you some idea, last year more people were murdered here in Venezuela than in Iraq and Caracas now has the highest murder rate of any capital city. As I step into the black 4x4 patrol car heading for Patau Ribario, one of the biggest most crime plague slums in Latin America, a few other worrying facts come to mind. This country has one of the globe's highest kidnapping rates and violent crime continues to rise. Leading the patrol is police officer Cesar Pineda, a thick set and softly spoken man in his late 30s. As we pass through dark, narrow, dimly lit streets, he explains that it's not uncommon to find as many as 20 people murdered here in just one night. Not long ago, he says, his team tried to rescue two kidnap victims from a house nearby. A lengthy firefight ensued. The trouble was, he added, suddenly pulling his revolver from its holster, we only had these. While the kidnap gang had high velocity rifles, they also had hand grenades and when they threw some of them at us, we had to pull back and they went off in Our patrol car, who, we ask him, is winning this war? You or criminals like them? After a short hesitation, he turns slowly shakes his head and says, them. As if living under the constant threat of violent crime isn't enough. People know that if they do get hurt, they'll struggle to get help in most public hospitals here. I visited one large dilapidated example in the west of the city. None of the toilets I saw was usable and only one lift worked in the whole nine storey building, so the only way to summon it was to shout into the lift shaft, sometimes for more than an hour. Most staff were reluctant to be interviewed, though one doctor did agree to speak clearly. Angry and close to despair, she took us into a small side room littered with broken machinery, sighed and said, last weekend was chaotic here. Six people came in with gunshot wounds, but we have few beds, no specialist doctors, no supplies, and our equipment doesn't work. What, we ask her is likely to happen to all those needing urgent medical help. They will die. They are dying, she said. This country is going from bad to worse. We don't have the dollars to buy the medicines we need. You go to a pharmacy and don't find anything. Similar shortages are also common on the streets outside. Lengthy queues up to a mile long often form at supermarkets for everything from basic foods to toilet paper. Meanwhile, inflation is running at 60%. All this in a country with the world's biggest oil reserves. But not all is doom and gloom. On walking past a petrol station, I discover that it's Christmas every day for Venezuela's motorists. At the black market rate, filling up your car can cost less than one penny here. This is because, under the revolutionary policy of the late President Hugo Chavez, oil belongs to the people of Venezuela. So the heavily indebted government, currently battling economic meltdown gives it away. A policy that costs the country billions of pounds a year. On arriving at Caracas airport for my flight home, I'm astonished at how deserted the terminal look. No big queues here. In fact, no evident queues at all. I ask an airline check in clerk whether the place is usually as quiet as this. Looking up rather languidly, he replies, this is busy compared to some days before. Adding, over the last year it's gone from being packed to almost empty. A couple of weeks ago, one of our aircraft left here with only one passenger on board. Perhaps that passenger, whoever he or she was, was relieved to escape what some are now calling a failed state, though perhaps not. This scenic and largely friendly country may often be puzzling, frustrating and even downright frightening. But there's one thing you'd never call it, and that's dull.
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Mike Thompson In Venezuela, Japan is in the grip of a demographic crisis. People are moving from countryside to city, the population is rapidly aging, and overall the number of Japanese is declining steadily. That raises the specter of a Japanese countryside pockmarked with deserted villages and abandoned farmland, with millions of the elderly living out bleak twilight years alone in apartment blocks in places like Tokyo or Osaka. And of course, hardest hit by this tide of depopulation will be the thousands of communities which lie away from Japan's big cities. Mark Whitaker took the boat to Shiraishi Jima, one of the hundreds of small islands which dot the Seto Inland Sea.
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In the classroom of a secondary school on a hill overlooking the Inland Sea, Sunao Amano is giving a talk with slides. Outside, it's a sultry summer's day. Swallows skim to and fro above the little fields of mulberry bushes. The classroom windows are open and Mr. Amano's words of wisdom drift lazily out on the afternoon breeze, mingling with the plaintive calls of distant buzzards cruising on the thermals. Mr. Amano is not a regular teacher. He's a local farmer who grows snow peas and squashes for a living. He's been invited to the school to describe the work he does and maybe try to convince his audience that they too, one day might make a living out of growing vegetables. Mr. Amano's talk is a red letter day for the school, an imposing two story building complete with sports ground, gym and running track. All the pupils are there to listen, all eight of them. The entire seven strong teaching staff has turned out too. The little island of Shiraishi Jima is just a 20 minute ferry ride from the mainland port of Kasaoka, but the short hop from the hubbub and the hurly burly of Honshu's jam packed southeastern seaboard to the island's soft and languid silences is like a trip to a different world. The island is roughly three miles long and a mile or so across its granite spine is a switchback range of steep forested hills crowned with rock formations sculpted by wind and rain. From the top, there are spectacular views over the island. Spangled inland sea Amy Chaves was born and raised in the American state of Ohio. She came to Shireishi 17 years ago, fell in love with the place and has lived here ever since. She earns a living as a freelance writer and running a summer beach bar on the island's main strand. When Amy first Arrived on the island, there were nearly 1,000 people living here. Today, there are just 570. Many of them are elderly. In fact, there are some people on the island who seem incredibly old. Gnarled and wizened with weather beaten faces the colour of teak, they look like ancient trees from a Japanese garden. But they're incredibly sprightly too. Out at daybreak, hoeing their vegetable plots or trundling their shopping trolleys at a rate of knots up the steep little lanes out of the village, a comparative youngster is 68 year old Tycho Amano. All of her 11 children have up sticks and left the island. And Tycho is a widow. But she says she will never leave the island. Her house is the home of her dead husband's ancestors and she must care for them. Besides, she loves her island. But people are leaving. In the village there are scores of houses where now only the ghosts of dead ancestors reside. Shuttered, they stand silent and empty. Things might be different if there were job opportunities. There was once a stone quarry on the island, but that closed. Fishing is the main occupation. A handful of fishing smacks sail out from the harbour. Sea bream and Japanese Spanish mackerel. Irregular catches. But some of the island's fishermen have also been trawling for wives. Shirai Shijima now has five Chinese brides and they've had 11 children. With more children running around, there's hope the threat to close the island's school may yet be fought off. Amy Chavez thinks closing the school would be a tipping point for the island. It would stop being a real community. Then, should that matter, one more Japanese village which puts the shutters up. The answer, as far as Amy is concerned, is to be found as night falls on a patch of dusty gravel behind the village hall to a drumbeat which has echoed here down the centuries. The villagers are practicing a dance called the Shiraishi Odori. It commemorates a sea battle fought 800 years ago between rival clans in which, it's said the inland sea turned crimson with the blood of the dead. No other island in the Seto Sea has. The dance for each island is unique. If Shiraishi Jima dies, its traditions and folk memories will die with it. And a tiny part of the planet's cultural DNA will have been lost forever. Up at the school on the hill, Mr. Amano has finished his talk on the cultivation of snow peas. The walls are hung with photographs of happy looking students on school trips to Tokyo. The lure of the bright lights burns strongly for most young people, but hopefully Mr. Amano can persuade some of them there's a happy future to be had here on Shiraishi Jima.
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And that was Mark Whittaker. Thousands of Britons are about to set off for the summer holidays in Greece, but few of them will get to visit the peninsula of Mount Athos in the north of the country, not far from the city of Thessalonica. It's no Aegean holiday destination. Its beaches are empty. There are no hotels or holiday villas. Instead, it's home to 20 ancient monasteries, some of which have been there since the dawn of civilization itself. The monks might tell you that Mary, the mother of Jesus, walked ashore there and was overcome by the wild natural beauty of the place. Today, though, as Malcolm Billings has been finding out, only men are allowed to visit what's often called the holy mountain.
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The view of these monasteries as we approach from the sea is spectacular. Some are just like medieval castles, with high stone walls clinging to the face of the mountain overlooking the blue water of the Aegean. I join other pilgrims arriving at the main gate, booking in with the guest master for the night. A glass of raki, distilled on the premises, and a plate of Turkish delight. Actually, they call it Greek delight here. After that welcome, the visitor is expected to make a donation of €12 for dinner, bed and breakfast. At the heart of the monastery, there's a Byzantine church richly decorated with religious frescoes, a library with rare early manuscripts, workshops, storerooms, and an inner courtyard with dormitories for scores of pilgrims. This peninsula of medieval monasteries is a unique part of Europe, a monastic mini state, self governing under the Greek flag. So, like the rest of the pilgrims, I needed a visa to step ashore. The monks sign on for life. They've chosen the monastic way so that they can pursue their religious faith and, as one young Greek monk explains, for the comradeship and lifestyle. Another says he did a business degree but gave up his job in Athens so that he could live here and specialize in creating icons in the monastery's art studio. The pilgrims come from all over the Christian Orthodox world. I talked to a young Russian. His day job's in the army. He's a gunner in a missile division. But today he's wearing a T shirt with I love the Maldives emblazoned on it. I got up with the others after a monk knocked on the dormitory door at four in the morning for prayers in the church just as dawn was breaking. I was told to remember not to cross my legs in church and to walk with my hands clasped in front of me. At breakfast with the whole community. There's a richly flavoured lentil soup, a plate of grilled sardines, salad, an apple from the orchard and bread, and, as it's apparently a special day, flagons of red wine from last year's vintage. But there's no talking during the meal, just readings from the Gospels. One of the monks whispered to me that this monastery and many others were in a sorry state until the 1960s. One I visited used to have just a handful of monks living on the floor of a medieval tower built as a refuge for when marauding pirates forced their way ashore. The rest of the site, including the church, was almost derelict. And the two oldest monks, now in their 80s and 90s, spent the best part of 50 years restoring the crumbling masonry and rotting oak beams. The tiny capital of Carrhes, high up on a ridge overlooking the sea, has a European Union office that funds many of the restoration projects. Projects. Monks and workers from the mainland buy building materials and deep frozen foods from a shop in the main street. Across the road, there's a coffee shop run by an Albanian known as Zog. Nearby, there's a school for boys, a clinic, a bakery and a shop with souvenirs. Until quite recently, there were no real roads here. Everything had to be carried by mules along cobbled tracks that linked the capital, the monasteries and the small ports along the coast. But the forest landscape has hardly changed in centuries. Logging is carefully controlled and no sheep or goats are allowed on a mountain path. I catch up with Irish botanist Jonathan Shackleton, who points out rare orchids in a carpet of flowers on either side of the path. This, he tells me, is a unique environment. 1500 different species of flowering plants and 130 different kinds of birds. But rather less welcome was the family of wild boar that came down from the mountain a few years ago to help themselves in the monastery vegetable garden. Since then, their number has multiplied. I count at least a hundred of them, but as the monks are vegetarian, the herd is destined for sale at the market in Thessaloniki. But missing from this apparently typical Greek scene are women. There isn't one anywhere. Pilgrims, wives and girlfriends must wait in the nearby ferry port of Ouranopolis. As my ferry bound from Mount Athos left the quayside, I looked towards the shore and spotted a solitary woman wearing flowing robes and tossing her long hair from side to side. And as she waved and called out to her lover on the ferry, I thought of the Greek sirens who lured ancient sailors onto the rocks of sin and desire.
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Malcolm Vellings at Mount Athos in Greece, just Two months to go now, until Scots vote in their referendum about whether or not they should remain part of the Union with the rest of Britain. Angus Roxburgh is a former BBC foreign correspondent based for many years in Moscow and other European capitals. On various occasions, he found himself reporting from small nations determined to break away from powerful neighbours to look after their own affairs. Sometimes they were successful, but often their aspirations led to violence.
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After half a lifetime abroad, I wasn't sure what to expect coming home. It's easy to get out of touch, less so now when you can follow everything on the Internet. But 20 or 30 years ago, as I immersed myself in foreign cultures, I was only dimly aware of much of what was going on back home. I've learned to bluff when people refer to television programmes that passed me by completely. I chose to come and live in Edinburgh, which I'd always thought of as one of the most beautiful cities on earth. I spend hours just tramping round these cobbled streets, these incomparable buildings set on ancient hills, and feel, I have to say, nothing but joy at being back. After decades of covering terrible events in woe, begone, strife torn places, this city seems so settled and peaceful. The art of resolving disagreements by civilized argument, not guns, seems imbedded in the very architecture. On the surface, the argument being resolved here in Scotland is not so very different from the disputes that caused so much of the havoc I have witnessed. A small nation sets out to assert its identity and thinks about breaking away and running its own affairs. Here we are doing it by persuasion and democratic vote, and we know our decision will be respected by the other side, even though they will be heartbroken if we vote in September's referendum to leave. That's not how it was in Chechnya back in the mid-90s. The Russian government that today defends the right of Crimeans to break away from Ukraine had no such sympathy for the aspirations of the Chechens to break away from Russia. They pulverized that land and its capital, Grozny. I never forget the images. Hundred meter long pits filled with bodies of Chechen men, many of them clearly executed with their hands tied. Behind them, villages blown to smithereens by Russian helicopter gunships. Children, sheep, cattle, massacred. Exultant Russian soldiers careering around the ruined city on their armored vehicles, glorying in their gory victory. A few years later, on a hilltop in Kosovo, I watched Serbian militias calmly walking around a village already deserted by its ethnic Albanian inhabitants, stealing everything of value, loading TVs and fridges onto lorries, then setting Fire to every house. That was their response to Kosova's yearning to run its own affairs on the other side of the world. In East Timor, the Indonesians were good at torching buildings too. After the Timorese voted for independence, the Indonesian army and its local militias made sure the new state would get off to the worst possible of starts by destroying as much of it as they could before they departed. Now in Ukraine, we see two brotherly nations who for centuries interlocked and intermarried, tearing each other apart. This is the most baffling conflict of all, surely one that could have been resolved around a negotiating table. Instead, its guns and masked faces, every slight, exaggerated, out of all proportion, whipped up nationalism, turning septic in people's veins. The only place that seemed to get this independence business right is Slovakia, where I happen to have been living for the past four years. Slovakia was the little brother in what was Czechoslovakia. Their population about half that of the Czechs. Their so called velvet divorce took place 21 years ago and really is a kind of model. Not that it happened in a very democratic way. There was no referendum and according to opinion polls, only a minority supported the split agreed by their governments. Nonetheless, after a period of upheaval as the two sides divvied up their armies and embassies and other property, it all seemed to work. And Slovakia is prospering today. Research in both countries shows there's little desire to return to a joint state. What intrigued me as I spoke to Slovaks about being independent was this. Almost everyone said, we get on better with the Czechs now than we ever did when we were together. We no longer complain that the Czechs boss us around and they no longer complain about supposedly subsidizing us. Those complaints sound a bit familiar here in Scotland. What the future holds is anyone's guess. But the Czechs and Slovaks have shown you can do it without the guns and the balaclavas, without even much ill will, and end up still the best of friends.
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The best of friends, England and Scotland. Well, let's hope that's how it all ends up. Angus Roxburgh there, returning to the programme and bringing this edition to a close. There'll be more dispatches from around the world on Saturday morning. Do join us. Goodbye.