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From Our Own Correspondent
Forensics and Scrummaging
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Correspondents' stories from around the world, introduced by Kate Adie.
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You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent.
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You can hear the version of the
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programme we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our site at BBConline. But here's the latest edition, broadcast on
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BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today, a top class education, respectable and laid back. But is the front nationals man on the French border hiding sharpened teeth in Afghanistan? Those in the Taliban's former stronghold are calling for more power. We hear how the guns may have been silenced in Sri Lanka, but violence is still in evidence, especially on the playing fields, and how screeching witches and letting it all shake are part of an artistic flowering in Tunisia. It was once a more obscure profession, but thanks to those American TV shows and a few from this side of the Atlantic, forensic science has become a hot subject for students essential to criminal investigation. It helps in archaeological digs, too. Take the case of Richard III's remains under that car park in Leicester. In El Salvador, though, which has one of the highest murder rates in the world and a low conviction rate, forensic scientists are thin on the ground. Will Grant went to meet the man known simply as the Engineer.
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It had taken a few furtive phone calls, but but eventually we agreed to meet high up on a mountainside. I had wanted to see the latest site he was working on and interview him at the crime scene, but his bosses weren't having that. I've been told off for talking to the media recently, he explained, his voice a hoarse whisper down the line. I can talk to you, but solely in a personal capacity. A couple of nights later, we drove up the snaking mountain roads to Huayua, a small town outside San Salvador, surrounded on both sides by rich jungle. The altitude makes it the perfect environment for coffee plantations and the perfect environment for hiding dead bodies. Although he doesn't like the title, Israel Tikas is El Salvador's only forensic archaeologist, a short, wiry guy with a dark, lined face, the result, no doubt, of so many hours working outside, he's shivering in the bitterly cold mountain air. We retire to a nearby restaurant to get warm, still wearing his hard hat. The dig he has come from was no hunt for Mayan pottery or dinosaur bones. Rather, it was a mass grave in El Salvador. Tikas is also known as the Engineer, a reference to the fact he initially studied computer engineering before turning his mind to solving murders. Forensic archaeology was unknown here in El Salvador, he tells me, his hands cupped around a mug of lukewarm hot chocolate. Rather, he learnt his skills as a criminal investigator abroad Particularly on visits to Africa, where he worked on sites of mass killings and genocide. Then he brought the DNA and victim identification techniques he'd seen back to his native El Salvador, until recently, the country with the highest murder rate in the world. What I did was fuse those methods, the engineer says. Adapt and apply them to the criminal gangs and their modus operandi. Here. Certainly, El Salvador's drug war has kept him in work. I've identified 25 different methodologies of murder, he explains with the matter of factness of a scientist. Every criminal mind is different, but each of them innovates too. For example, when dismembering a body, if one person disposes of it in seven parts, someone else says, I'm going to turn it into 20. It is a sobering thought. And over the course of our conversation, he reveals many more grisly details, most of which are far too gruesome to repeat here. I want to know how such daily exposure to the country's extreme violence makes him feel as a citizen rather than as a scientist. It makes me sad, he says in the first reference to emotion. Thus far, I don't agree with anyone's right to take away the life of someone else, especially when it's a Salvadoran taking the life of another Salvadoran. But then it's quickly back to the relative safety of empirical science. I've worked on more than 2,000 crime scenes. Thanks to God for giving me this little bit of intelligence. I've been able to recover bodies from places no one could have recovered them from. I've recovered people who were buried 60 metres deep, got all 206 bones of the body back. All that evidence, that is what gives me professional satisfaction. Israel is the subject of a recent documentary in which the filmmakers followed him as he exhumed remains from quarries and mines and shallow graves and deep pits across the country. Often the grieving mothers of the victims come to urge him personally to find their missing loved ones, heaping further pressure on a man already under considerable strain. At times, that strain begins to show. More than once he mentions the difficulty of working on the bodies of dead children, of holding a six year old skull in his hands and having to think of it as just evidence, as material. I give conferences in university psychology departments and I tell them, you should study me. What's wrong with me? How can I work cleaning the face of a dead baby with a brush for two days and not feel anything? His rhetorical questions hang in the mountain air. But then sometimes I might suddenly drop the brush, look to the heavens and ask God, how can you allow this to happen? His morbid fascination could just be the natural byproduct of work, which has undoubtedly brought some closure to hundreds of families in Salvador. An inherently private man, Israel Tikas insists he's fine, unaffected by post traumatic stress. Yet something he said revealed a little of what it must be like to be the engineer of El Salvador. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a film, but then when I open my eyes, it's reality.
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Will Grant with El Salvador's only forensic archaeologist, the Chancellor announced in his budget speech yesterday that the growth forecast for the UK had risen to 2.7%, which is good news. In contrast, the latest growth figure for our French neighbours is just 0.3%. It's this kind of poor economic performance that has fed discontent with the major political parties. One of the main beneficiaries has been the far right, Frond Nacional, which is hopeful of securing several town halls in municipal elections beginning on Sunday, Emma Jane Kirby visited one of the party's target towns close to the German border in northeast France.
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The young men are smashing a bin, plastic shards splintering over the pavement as they kick and jump on it, hurling obscenities. When it's completely flattened, they retreat, panting and laughing. But one North African teenager, seemingly driven by an atavistic fury, continues to pound the fragments, screaming, I break everything. You hear me? I'm going to break everything in this. There's a lot in Vorbach that's already broken. Unemployment here is close to 15%, and almost a third of young people are jobless. The average wage is just £14,500 a year, and the lack of spending power is evident in the town centre. Scores of shop fronts are boarded up. I take a tour around the town with an elderly, erudite local historian, Jean Claude Flaus, who shows me the painful reminders of Forbach's better times. The remains of a massive cardboard factory now flattened into a car park. Mine shafts idle since 2005. And in the suburbs, the miners, former accommodation blocks now largely populated by refugees and immigrants for whom the town can offer no work. Police sirens wail continuously. Predictable theme music, says M. Flaus, for a town that's been left to rot. He asks if I'm really surprised that this is fertile ground full of Frontes National. In Forback's marketplace, wearing jeans and a blue suit jacket, Florian Filipault, the Front National's deputy leader and candidate for the mayoral elections, gives a laid back but respectable impression as he chats to locals and hands out his political pamphlets. As the party's spin doctor, he spent a long time purging it of its thuggish, anti Semitic, racist image and replacing it with something far more nebulous. He was educated at Paris's elite universities, the same universities attended by the French president Francois Hollande. And when I ask him what someone who is so clearly part of the system is doing in an extreme right party that prides itself on being anti establishment, he winces. My education, he says coolly, has made me acceptable to many voters who would normally never vote for the Front National. But my parents were primary school teachers, so I'm not from the privileged class. I understand what being hard up means. He leans forward in his chair. And I don't like to be called far right, he corrects me firmly. I am a Gaullist. I ask him how a party which has talked about closing the borders can hope to succeed in a town that has a huge immigrant population and which is a stone's throw from the German frontier. He flings open the window in his office. This is wide open, he says patiently, as if teaching a child. And this, he adds, putting the catch on the first notch is part our maxim is manage the borders, not close them. Subtle tweaks to the rhetoric, a shifting of emphasis, a misting of meaning, a blurring of ideologies. I think of One of Francois Mitterrand's favourite quotes from a 17th century cardinal if you set aside ambiguity, it's always to your own detriment. In a pavement cafe, Marcel and Pascal grumble together over the local paper. Pascal, now in his mid-50s, was a minor and union leader who fought bitterly against the pit closures. He jabs his finger at a picture of President Hollande and mutters that neither the Socialist nor the opposition right wing UMP party have a clue what it's like to struggle. Marcel looks up from the sports results and mentions he met Florian Filippo at lunchtime in the market. And I wait for Pascal, the former unionist, the former communist, to spit blood. I'm thinking about voting for him, he says quietly. Catching my astonished glance, he snaps, oh, just look around you. This town is dying. What have mainstream politicians done for us? We've had enough. My historian, Monsieur Flauss, tells me there used to be 40 nationalities in Forbach when the pits were operating in the 1960s, and there were never any problems with racism. You know, this is a place with such a great past, but the way it's being run, it has no future. He pauses. We need a shock and a shake. Up here. So for the first time in my life, I'm probably going to vote Front National. In the marketplace, Florian Filippo is sharing a joke with an Arab man who's selling cheap plastic bracelets. As they shake hands, the man tells the National Front candidate that he recognises a fellow hard worker and assures him he has his vote. A far right political group, which was once called a fringe party, now creeping as softly as the springtime sun into the mainstream. At the fruit and veg stall, an old woman beckons me over. There's a French expression she says you should know. Quinces fleurs, c' est qui un lout when it looks a little hazy. Beware the wolf out there.
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Emma Jane Kirby in Forbach. By the end of the year, all British and American combat troops should have left Afghanistan, and the people will soon have a new president. Amid concerns about what happens next and whether the Taliban will return, all ordinary Afghans have to get on with their lives, including trying to make a living. Karen Allen recently visited Kandahar once at Taliban stronghold, to see how people there are facing up to the changes.
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It was mid afternoon and men in battered cars and dusty old jeeps were doing what looked like the school run. Children, most of them young boys, weaved in and out of the parked cars lined along a dusty tree lined boulevard. It was a scene of normality in a secure bubble of gated stability. This was not the Kandahar I was expecting. Famed as the former capital of the Taliban government, an ancestral home of President Karzai, Kandahar is regarded as something of a bastion of conservatism. The neighbourhood I'd arrived at was Aino Mina City, a pastel painted property zone. Some houses painted pomegranate pink, others shimmering white. Hotels, pharmacies and banks, all accessible by foot, at least for Kandahar's privileged elite. Although this gated community has not escaped the violence of occasional insurgent attacks, it is considered safe by Afghan standards, and the Florentine fountains help you forget you're still in a war zone. This sanitised property sector is the work of Mahmoud Karzai, the President's brother. There are still many unanswered questions as to how he acquired the money to fund it. Yet the place feels to me like a metaphor for an aspiring country saddled with a complex past and looking to an uncertain Future. Half built 20 minutes before, I had stumbled across this somewhat surreal neighbourhood in warm Kandahar City. I was leaving the cold concrete blast walls of a militarized Afghan national army base. Staring down at me along the road were towering billboards displaying election posters and nod towards a tense few weeks ahead. If all goes according to plan, there will be presidential elections next month. They say that if you win votes in Kandahar, you win the whole of Afghanistan. But there are few other signs of campaigning here. As we headed closer to the city, we pass neatly stacked red shipping containers set back from the road, an hour's drive from the border with Pakistan. They're evidence of the departure over the course of this year of many thousands of foreign troops. Political wrangling has stalled a decision on exactly how many boots on the ground will remain. But their departure is unsettling to many who live here. Away from the distractions of Ainomena City, we pass the huge, unfinished mosque built on the site of a former cinema. It was the footprint left behind by Mullah Mohammed Omar, the elusive one eyed spiritual leader of the Taliban. It dominates a corner of the city like a monument to the recent pasque. And all around, there's a frenzied atmosphere of commerce. And it's that commerce that's drawn me to Kandahar. I've come to meet an Afghan businessman, Faisal Haq Mushkani. A proud man in his late 50s. He's impeccably dressed with a turban, a tailored grey waistcoat worn over a white shawar kameez. His warm handshake signals that I am welcome in his city, despite not many Westerners venturing here. Trained in medicine in neighbouring Pakistan, he returned to his native Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban government in 2001. He was optimistic that one could succeed in business here. Feisal was among a handful of Afghan businessmen who took over a disused industrial park first established under the Soviets who controlled Afghanistan in the 1980s. He was one of the first arrivals and set up a small plastics factory here. But as more refugees flooded back into Afghanistan, the pressure on electricity supplies in Kandahar City intensified. What little there was came from the nearby Kajiki Dam, but it wasn't enough. So as demand took off, electricity costs soared and businesses like Faisal's folded. But three years ago, Feisal's optimism returned with promises of more support for small businesses and modest improvements in security. He set up a plant making paper bags for Afghanistan's dried fruit industry. The generators are paid for by British aid and business seems to be doing well. But Feisal fears the funds will start to dry up once foreign troops and aid workers pull out of Afghanistan. Feisal believes his country is teetering on the edge of opportunity. But to build on this, he believes, the government should be addressing shortcomings in infrastructure. It should generate revenues from private businesses and confront corruption and waste. And it must improve power supplies. Despite millions of dollars of aid, he says, Kandahar receives just a quarter of the energy it needs to function efficiently. No one knows when the foreign aid money will finally dry up, but it will be soon. For Faisal, power and security are the number one issues for Afghanistan today. Elections are just weeks away now, and he fears the victors will have more to worry about than providing electricity for communities like his.
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Karen Allen in Kandahar In Britain, we like to boast that we codified almost every sport played around the world and exported it. Football's obviously the most successful one in South Asia. It was cricket that grabbed the imagination. Alex Preston recently enjoyed a game in Sri Lanka, but found that five years after the end of the civil war there, a somewhat rougher sport is taking root.
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Asgharia Stadium, Kandy, one of the most beautiful cricket grounds in the world. Ringed by jagged hills, parakeets arrow across the outfield, flocking between the branches of banana palms and baobabs that lower over the fences. The air is rich with sound as I walk out to bat the rising call of brain fever birds, the rattling whine of tuk tuks bustling along the city's colonial grid of streets, and, rather unsettlingly, the grunts of 20 burly adolescents who appear to be trying to kill each other in one corner of the ground. After the match, which saw our team of English authors trounced by the local prison guards, I wander over to the young men who are still throwing their sweat gleaming bodies at one another. Evening is falling, and the biggest fruit bats I've ever seen glide low over the stadium, stretching out their umbrella like wings. I speak to a boy, Boudicca, who's a head taller than me. He's at Candy's prestigious Trinity College. The boys gather round me. Behind them, grinning and avuncular, is their Kiwi coach, Neil Foote, one of a new band of rugby professionals now plying their trade in the country. The boys talk glowingly of the extraordinary rise of rugby in Sri Lanka. It is the fastest growing sport on the island, they tell me, with a fiercely fought local league, an international tournament, the Serendib cup between Sri Lanka, Madagascar and Poland, and a government with a paternal interest in the game's ongoing success. Two of President Mahinda Rajapaksa's sons take turns captaining the national side The Rajapasga family has spent the years since the end of the country's 30 year civil war in 2009 consolidating its hold on power. Mahinda Rajapakska's brother, Gotabaya, is Minister of Defence, while another brother, Basil, is Minister of Economic Development. A third, Chamal, is Speaker of the Sri Lankan Parliament. Other Rajapaska family members occupy posts ranging from Chairman of Sri Lankan Airlines to the ambassador to the U.S. now, the latest province to fall under the family's sway is rugby, a sport which has been played in the country since 1879 but which has only recently achieved widespread popularity in Colombo. A few days after our game in Kandy, a local rugby playing friend, Ravinda Alvis, offers to introduce me to Yoshita Rajapaska, the President's second son. We drive to an anonymous looking street in the Cinnamon Gardens district of the city, a metal door in a high whitewashed wall. I step inside and am led into the courtyard of what might be a Balinese spa with butterflies flitting across manicured grass, dark wood furniture strewn around burbling water features. There, striding towards me, is the President's son, muscular and precise in spanking white navy officer's uniform. He ushers me into a light filled meeting room. I ask him if the rumours that he gets an easy ride on the rugby pitch are true. He pulls up a pressed trouser leg to show me his ankle recently broken by a teammate in training. If anything, he says, they tackle me harder. He doesn't tell me what happened to the teammate. Rugby, he tells me, is more than a game. It is the glue that is sticking the country back together in the wake of the civil war. Of the 32 man national squad, six are Tamil and eight Muslims. When we are on the rugby pitch we forget about history, he says. We don't see each other as Tamil or Sinhalese, Buddhist or Muslim. Sport is the language we all share. I ask him how he feels about the way his father's government is represented in the Western media as posturing, power hungry, even tyrannical. I laugh. He says the foreign press is a fairy tale. This government has changed everything for the people of Sri Lanka. When I was a boy we used to check the papers every day, trying to work out where the next bomb would be. That is tyranny. Now we have extraordinary freedom. I think back to Boudicca at the Kandy Stadium. Why do you play rugby, not cricket? I asked him. It's a violent game, he said, grinning. Sri Lankans are violent it is why we love rugby. This much is true, but I'm still struck by the sense of energy and optimism surrounding the game. The national side has a good chance of making the 2019 World cup, with even the most cynical locals passionately backing the tuskers. Sri Lankan rugby may be funded by an autocratic regime, but it is making a difference to the everyday lives of this first generation. Growing up free from the shadow of
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civil war, scrumming down with Alex Preston in Sri Lanka, the Arab Spring was a time of momentous change and hope. For many, freedom of expression was the order of the day. Today, there are far fewer signs of that freedom and more. Much of the hope has evaporated. But in Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began, the country's new constitution has received praise for its tolerance. And as Susanna Knights found away from politics, there's been a flourishing of artistic expression.
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The southern Tunisian town of Tosa rises up from an oasis on the northern rim of the Sahara Desert. It is built from ornate sandy coloured brickwork brought to the area by 10th century Arab invaders. The shops and mosques are covered with the same diamond patterns and arcs found on the Berber carpets made in the region. Some palm trees from the surrounding oasis have crept into the town itself, stooping under the weight of cascades of succulent dates. Our dates are like condensed sunlight, my old host father once said to me, and there's a lot of that to condense. A big white sun bleaches the sandy town during the day and drapes it in gold at sunset. All told, it's a dramatic setting for an international arts festival, the Festival Internationale de la Ronde Populaire. The name refers to a popular Arab tradition of storytelling even older than Islam, in which communities gathered in a circle to tell, sing or even dance out tales. The programme was nothing if not eclectic. First up, a young theatre troupe whose piece Farahmen Sultani, or the Sultan's Command, delved into Tunisian folklore with colorful masks, slapstick fights and lots of screeching from a small witch. The Tunisians at least found it hilarious. One of the most hotly anticipated acts was the music group Nouveau System. Merging Tunisian melodies with a reggae backing, their lyrics examined the state of post revolutionary society. The group formed after they started singing about martyrs of the revolution during a sit in protest in 2011. They were followed by a contemporary dancer who treated us to a series of popular reboot dances. Raising his arm straight up in the air, he proceeded to gyrate everything from the stomach down, gripped by the intoxicating drumbeats of traditional mesued music. Tunisia has witnessed something of an artistic boom since 2011. Nowadays you can find everything. There are reggae musicians who call for the legalization of marijuana. There are rappers asking why Tunisians are now idolizing Karl Marx rather than Mohammed the Prophet. On a walk around town, you are just as likely to find graffiti warning members of the new cabinet not to abuse their power as you are to find football slogans or Quranic verses. There is barely any funding for the arts, public or private, but after decades of oppression, there is a sense that the new freedom of expression is worth more than financial reward. Not everyone is enthusiastic about this creative explosion, though. Achref is also young and a pretty suave individual. He picked me up in his 4x4 and whisked me to a trendy new cafe. He's one of the country's leading oud players, a highly trained professional. Everyone now thinks they can be an artist, he moaned wearily. And much of it is just bad. People think that they can throw two chords together on a guitar, say I hate politicians, put it on the Internet and they will be a famous musician. Artists have also discovered that censorship still exists and doesn't always come from the government. One picture in a 2012 contemporary art exhibition showed God's name spelled out with ants. It caused such outrage among some Islamist groups that the gallery was attacked and a city wide curfew was enforced. Yet the artists in Tozer aren't cowed. They are determined to use the aftermath of the revolution to create and to make art which is distinctively theirs. A young member of the Masked Theatre group told me, we already know about German and Italian theatre, about Stanislavski and all the other guys ending in Afsky, he said, now we're trying to find something which is our own. Later, in a cafe, the contemporary dancer explained, there has been an identity search happening since the revolution in the whole of society, but particularly amongst artists. Everyone is asking, who are we, us Tunisians? Are we European? Arab? Berber? What are the messages that we should be broadcasting to people on the day after the new constitution was ratified, I attended a satirical concert in Tunis National Theatre. One particularly funny impression parodied English news sources describing how progressive the constitution is, especially considering it is Arab. I went with a couple of Tunisian friends who are normally cynical about anything to do with their country, but even they were impressed. Finally, something Tunisian that is actually good, they said afterwards. They were talking about their musicians, not their politicians.
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Susanna Knights in Tunisia ending this edition of from our own Correspondent On a positive note join me again for more stories on Saturday morning. Goodbye.