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From Our Own Correspondent
Fraying at the Edges
00:28:16
Correspondents worldwide: Kevin Connolly talks of unfinished business in the Middle to...
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- [00:00]
Kate Adie
Hello from the.
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Justin Rowlatt
From our own correspondence studios at Broadcasting
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David Mazower
House in London, you've downloaded the latest
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Kieran Cook
edition of the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
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Presenter
It's introduced by Kate Ady today, Remembrance Weekend. And that map of the Middle east the great powers drew up at the end of the First World War seems finally to be fraying at the edges. Sri Lanka stands accused of serious and continuing human rights abuses as it prepares to host the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting India's multi million mission to Mars. Can it really benefit even the poorest scavenging on the rubbish tips of Delhi? And what would you take if you had to leave home in a hurry? It's a question that emerges after the discovery of that huge hoard of looted art in Germany. This is once again the season of remembrance, and it's the last one before the time comes to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Great War. The idea of creating a national day to remember the fallen of Britain and its empire grew out of the appalling sacrifice of that conflict. The grinding misery of the trenches still exerts a powerful grip on our collective imagination. A hundred years on, when much else about that war has been forgotten, how exactly did it start? How exactly did it change the countries which fought in it? What were the results when the guns fell silent? As Remembrance Day approaches, Kevin Connolly has been travelling in Iraq, one of the countries created in the aftermath of the Great War. And he discovered, in the Kurdish city of Erbil, a growing belief that the map created by the victorious powers in the post war world may be about to change.
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Kate Adie
Even at moments of remembrance, the origins of the First World War seem as distant as the fall of Rome. The steps in the doomed diplomatic dance of the summer of 1914 are hopelessly remote. To the modern mind, it's not just the vanished imperial ambitions and strategic balances. This was a world where politicians still wore frock coats and the seditious syncopations of ragtime were an affront to Christian decency. But there are places where the furtive manoeuvrings of the politicians which went on in parallel with the fighting, still feel like unfinished business. Very few Western Europeans could tell you what the main result of the First World War really was, except that it led directly to the Second. It brought countless indirect changes too, of course, but they are hard to measure. The role of women in parts of Europe and North America at least, was transformed. And perhaps a habit of deference vanished too. Before the Great War, domestic service was one of the biggest employers in British society. After it, everyone but the very rich had to learn to make their own tea and iron their own jodhpas. In Erbil, though, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, everyone knows what the main result of the First World War was, and everyone sees it as unfinished business. When the guns fell silent, the Kurds were left without a homeland and they're still without one. The Kurdish people were divided between Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey, their dreams of statehood crushed. But as the rest of the world prepares to remember the start of the war, there are people in Kurdistan who think it's possible that they might be about to change the outcome. The principal architects of the post world war order in the Middle east were a pair of British and French diplomats, Sir Mark Sykes and Francois Georges Picot. To them fell the task of dividing up the empire of Germany's most important ally, Turkey, an empire which included much of the Middle East. The goal was not of course, to improve the lot of the Arab people struggling under the Turkish yoke. It was to make sure that Britain and France emerged from the costly carnage in Europe with some sort of tangible benefit. The secret talks were concluded about a month before the Battle of the somme began in 1916. In many ways, the world still lives with the consequences of the decisions made and the promises given. Around that time there were assurances to Arab leaders about the post war rewards that Britain could offer in return for fighting the Turks. And there was the Balfour Declaration which committed the British to the establishment of a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people. It could have been even more complicated if Imperial Russia had survived to take a share of the spoils. It might have got Istanbul. But for the Kurds there was to be nothing. Now, though, a hundred years on from the Great War, the self serving map on which the victorious powers sketched out new countries like Iraq and Syria is fraying at the edges. The Syria which was given to the French may not survive the grinding misery of its own civil war as a unitary state. And the prosperous Kurdish part of Iraq in the north feels more and more like a different country from the troubled Arab south. It has a flag, an anthem, armed forces and it's got oil too. Businessmen who trade there compare it to the Dubai of 20 years ago. Might that growing autonomy one day crystallize into statehood in a smoky tea room dug like a cave into the heart of the ancient market in Erbil? The disappointments of history the have made men cautious. But a sense of optimism now pervades the atmosphere as palpably as the thick fog of tobacco smoke which stains the old photographs on the Wall a darker shade of sepia. Sir Mark Sykes and Mr. Georges Picot, largely forgotten in their own countries and not much admired by those who do remember them, would blush to know how often their names crop up in conversations in. In Kurdish cities like Erbil. At times of remembrance in Western Europe, most of us perhaps, tend to focus on the small things and the personal. The fighting, for example, brought the first of my relatives to Britain to fight its wars and then dig its roads. The bigger questions was there anything to show for all that suffering are just too big and too bleak? But in Erbil and in other Kurdish cities, too, there's a growing feeling that a change in the outcome of the fighting, which has been a century in the making, might finally be within reach.
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Presenter
And that's Kevin Connolly. Next week, 50 world leaders representing 2 billion people worldwide will be in Sri Lanka for the Commonwealth Summit, the largest international gathering on the island for decades. But the Canadian prime minister, for one, says he's not going to. He talks of allegations raised by the UN that the Sri Lankan government committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during the final phase of the civil war against the Tamil tiger rebels in 2009. Canada also points to ongoing human rights abuses, charges officials in Colombo dismiss. Frances Harrison has been investigating allegations from Sri Lankans who fled abroad. They've given her details of rape and torture, some of which they say happened since the war.
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Frances Harrison
Sri Lanka is at peace for the first time in a generation. The government finally crushed the Tamil Tiger rebels designated as terrorists around the world. But ever since, Sri Lanka has been dogged by accusations that it committed war crimes. President Mahinda Rajapaksa denies this, saying his soldiers went into battle with a human rights charter in one hand and a gun in the other. Try telling that to Siva, not his real name, who was detained in various police stations in the heart of the capital towards the end of the war. He tells me how his teeth were smashed, his toenails pulled out. Naked and blindfolded, he was beaten, kicked, punched, electrocuted in a box like a freezer, injected, hung upside down and submerged in water, suffocated with a plastic bag filled with petrol over his head. Siever says he narrowly escaped execution. He hearing the gunshots as 13 fellow prisoners were killed. He survived because at the very last minute, a phone call came through saying his wife had paid a bribe to keep him alive. Perhaps the worst, he goes on, was when they used a greased water pipe to insert barbed wire inside his rectum. Bleeding, Siva was dispatched to a military hospital where he says the Doctors gave him 18 stitches so he could be sent back for more torture. Siva describes being curtained off in the hospital ward, observed by cameras and too terrified to talk to anyone else. Now a refugee in Europe, he shows me a file full of court documents proving when and where he was held. Every month in Colombo, he was produced before a magistrate to extend his detention order. All the officers names are carefully recorded in English, rather poorly typed, but officially stamped and signed. I asked if he thought the men who tortured him would one day pay for what they did. No, he replied. Almost as an afterthought, he added that before he was released, he was forced to pay for alcohol and food for his torturers to hold a party. Four years on, Siva pulls out an array of medication from his briefcase. Sleeping pills and painkillers, operations, physiotherapy, psychotherapy will not cure him, his doctor tells us. He will never truly recover, even with the best medical care. Nobody else should suffer like me. Siva told me I was to hear the same words again and again from Tamils who say they were abducted by the security forces in Sri Lanka's notorious white vans. One slender, childlike woman with huge eyes told me how she'd been repeatedly raped this year after being picked up returning from church. Church and A burly rugby player says he was abducted after having dinner with old friends and then branded with hot metal rods on his back. Tearful women describe tiny, windowless rooms in which an array of men in army uniforms kick, punch, slap, and then rape them. They lose count of how many men over the weeks, bitten and scratched. They are also burned with cigarettes on their breasts, backs and thighs, so they can't hide the torture from their families. They talk of hearing female voices screaming in Tamil, but are never allowed to meet another prisoner and have no idea where they're held. Most say they sign a confession on the first or second day, but that doesn't stop the abuse. Eventually a relative will trace them and pay a bribe for their release. The detainees are blindfolded and put in the back of a van and driven around for an hour or two, unsure if they're being taken for execution. The handover happens at an isolated spot, large sums of money in exchange for a human being so broken it's hard to imagine they'll ever enjoy life again. These aren't only allegations from the civil war that ended in 2009. I've heard accounts from 12 people who allege they were raped this year, 2013. The Sri Lankan government, though, denies there's any systematic torture or rape taking place. Instead, it says, those who allege abuse may have been paid to discredit the country or even tortured by the Tamil Tigers themselves. Meanwhile, the invisible survivors stack shelves in supermarkets in the cities of Europe, sweep floors and work night shifts. Refugees conspicuous only for their dark skins and an inability to speak the local language. Many only keep on living for the sake of their children. But not all. The rugby player was discovered by his young son trying to hang himself with his bed sheet in his own home. For him, the war is not over.
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Presenter
Frances Harrison now what on earth is a country with such terrible poverty doing spending millions on a mission to Mars? This has been a fairly typical response to the news that India's launched a mission to the Red Planet. For India, it's an opportunity to come on top of a new Asian space race. But what about the cost? Couldn't the cash have been spent lifting many out of poverty? Fair questions, says our Justin Rowlatt, who's just been to the research institute at the centre of the space adventure. And on his way there, he stopped off in Delhi and spent a morning with the street children, grubbing a living amidst the city's rubbish.
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Justin Rowlatt
When you see young children darting between lumbering locomotives to snatch up an empty water bottle, or raking through great mountains of wreaking refuse for the plastic bags and broken cardboard boxes they gather together to sell for fractions of a penny, it does appear unarguable that social welfare should be put before any attempt to reach for the stars. But I was to discover neither the plight of Delhi's street children nor the apparent extravagance of India's otherworldly ambitions were quite what they seemed. The team of Indian scientists designing the delicate instruments made to sniff and probe the Red Planet are based in the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat. I'd been expecting the kind of shimmering glass monolith you'd associate with a NASA lab or with the headquarters of one of India's world Beating it companies. But the cradle of the nation's space research harks back to another, older India. There's a hand painted no Spitting sign in English and Hindi at the gate, and inside the slightly shabby 1970s blocks are shaded by gracious tropical trees full of squabbling parakeets. Yet the scientists who work here confounded the world when India's 2008 lunar probe confirmed the presence of water on the moon, something previous missions had missed. We've had to make a virtue of our limitations, says Professor Jitendra Goswami, the director of the Institute and the man behind the discovery. He's proud that at some £50 million, India's Mars mission is the cheapest in history by a considerable margin. The payload is tiny, hardly more than 30 pounds, small enough to take on as cabin baggage, he jokes. Our instruments may cover a very narrow range, he says, serious now. But they're looking somewhere no one else has looked. That's why we found water on the moon. He hopes his mission will help answer the key question has there ever been life on Mars? By testing for methane over the entire planet's surface, it will also be looking at how the Martian atmosphere has changed. I came away impressed at how India's space program uses its tiny resources to do innovative and original science. But in some ways, what the street children of Delhi do is is even more impressive. They find value in something that is regarded as completely worthless by most people in the city's rubbish. These are some of the poorest people in what is still a very poor country. Yet what strikes you when you meet them is not their desperation and despondency. Quite the opposite. Many are energetic and creative entrepreneurs. My guide was Iqbal, a former street child who'd been taken into care by a charity called the Salam Balak Trust. Iqbal was abused as a child and ran away to live rough in Delhi when he was just 10. To my surprise, he says, life was not that hard. Food is no problem, iqbal explains. Lots of charities give out free food. I'd spend the money I earned collecting rubbish playing video games in the back street arcades. In fact, one of the biggest challenges for the Salam Barak Trust and charities like it is persuading the children to give up life on the streets to come and live in their shelters and homes. They get addicted to this sort of life, Mrs. Gargan Singh, one of the Salam Balak trustees, tells me with a sigh of resignation. They start enjoying the freedom. Street life may be exciting, but it is dangerous. Street children are prey to gangs and pedophiles. Many sniff glue and take drugs. Which is why, Mrs. Singh tells me, inspiring role models are so important. In one of the trust's shelters, Iqbal points proudly to a poster with photos of half a dozen former street children brought up by the trust. Amit has just finished an electronic engineering course. Sonia is doing fashion designing. And, he says, clearly impressed. Niaz is working at Domino's Pizza as a team leader. And back in Ahmedabad, Professor Goswami believes the Mars mission should inspire, too. He first became fascinated by space after the launch of Sputnik, the world's first satellite, back in 1957. Night after night I lay stretched out on the lawn in my parents garden in Assam, he recalled, looking up into the heavens to try and catch a glimpse of Sputnik passing. He argues that if the Mars mission is successful, every Indian child, whether in the village in Assam or on the streets of Delhi, can look up into the night sky and when they catch a glimpse of the red glimmer of Mars, will know their country has been there. He hopes it will raise the ambitions of the entire nation.
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Presenter
Justin Rolatt Officials from the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central bank have been in Dublin this week discussing the final stages of Ireland's multi billion pound bailout deal. Earlier, the government said it no longer needed European cash aid. The prime minister, Ender Kenny, told his Fine Gael party conference the economic emergency was coming to an end. Without doubt, the country's had to endure a turbulent ride these last few years. At one stage it boasted one of the world's fastest growing economies. But then came a devastating crash. Kieran Cook climbed aboard a train in the west of Ireland to see whether people are now a little more optimistic about the future.
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Kieran Cook
It's seven o' clock in the morning in the west of Ireland and I'm sitting on a train being given a lecture on the strange habits of jellyfish by a Norwegian, an expert on such matters. At this hour of the day, still pitch black outside the carriage window, it's a little hard to take the jellyfish. They are in their hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, says the Norwegian, full of enthusiasm for his subject. They come to the fish farms in the sea near here and they suffocate the salmon in their cages. The train jolts and we move forward from the town of Westport on Ireland's west coast, bound for Dublin in the east, a journey of just over three hours. Apparently more than 20,000 farmed salmon have been killed by a sudden influx of layer upon layer of jellyfish. I feel as if I'm being pulled down into the ocean depths. A little light shows in the sky. A thick mist hangs over the russet colored bog. The carriage bucks and rears like a frisky horse as we go over the uneven ground. And then the jellyfish, they suddenly disappear, says my Norwegian fellow traveller, waving hands excitedly in the air. We do not know where they go. Train journeys allow you to look into the back of other people's lives. There's a neat little garden there, all flower beds and finely cut lawn Next door, an abandoned sofa pokes through tall grass. A heap of drinks bottles is piled by the back door. The names of the small towns we stop at have a rolling poetry about them. Castle Bar, Clare, Morris, Ballyhornes, Castlerea. The Norwegian and his jellyfish leave, to be replaced by a twinkly eyed teacher. Conversations flow easily on trains, especially in Ireland. The teacher says at least 50% of her pupils who left school over the past five years since the recession hit Ireland like a gale force storm, have emigrated. I hear from them in Australia, Canada, Dubai. She says they miss home but have little notion of coming back. They've lost faith in the country. Who can blame them? Maybe it's the early morning, but she seems on the verge of tears. The bog gives way to little squares of lush green fields ringed by stone walls. Some areas are flooded. There's so much rain here, they say, that land isn't sold by the acre but by the bucketful, says the teacher, her humour restored. The breakfast trolley comes along, staffed by a smiling Latvian student. Unemployment in Ireland is running at about 14%, but it seems that many Irish, perhaps spoiled by the economic boom years, don't want to do the more menial jobs. The train is modern and clean. In the old days there was a restaurant car where a bow tied waiter would serve an Irish fry up a real heart attack on a plate. There'd be more frequent stops back then for cattle on the line, for engines overheating. No such hold ups now. Another stop, washing hangs optimistically in the rain. The teacher leaves, to be replaced by a couple of sprightly pensioner women. Despite austerity and cutbacks, some still live the good life in Ireland. Transport on the buses and trains is free for residents aged 66 and over. We're making sure we make use of the free travel before it's chopped, says one of the women, skin like tan leather. We often take off, never knowing where we'll end up. They collapse into giggles like two schoolgirls playing truant. We cross the Shannon, Ireland's major river. The boglands have been left behind. Now the fields are larger, the land more prosperous looking. But still there are signs of Ireland's economic decline. A half finished housing estate, the shell of a factory, holes in the roof as dark as a skeleton's eye sockets. Right on time. We pull into the station in Dublin. There are new flats and offices alongside the Liffey, the capital's main watercourse. Meet anyone interesting on the journey? Asks a friend. Well, there was a Norwegian and his jellyfish and a tearful teacher and a Latvian girl with a lovely smile. Oh, and a brace of giggling pensioners on a day out, I say. Oh, you weren't stuck for company then? Never a dull moment, I reply. The time just flew by.
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Presenter
Kieran Cook There on the railway lines of Ireland, we started this program with thoughts on remembrance, loss, and the legacy of war. They emerge again in the wake of that extraordinary discovery in Germany of a huge hoard of artwork looted by the Nazis. The 1400 pieces, valued at more than 800 million pounds, include previously unknown paintings by masters including Picasso, Toulouse Lautrec, Chagall, and Matisse. The issue of ownership is, they say, still being clarified and but many of the canvases are thought to have been taken from Jewish collectors and galleries. David Mazauer has been considering what human stories of loss may lie behind the recovery of these masterpieces.
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David Mazower
A New York Times headline summed up one view of the missing art. Art Trove. A Triumph Over Nazism, it announced. I wonder, for art historians, perhaps the sheer survival of these magnificent paintings is enough. But reading some of the comments online, it seemed clear that some saw the story through a very different lens, reading it as a tale of Jewish wealth and privilege, as though every Jewish family in pre war Europe owned a Picasso or a Matisse, and as though anyone who now came forward to claim ownership was greedily depriving the public of works that rightfully belonged in museums. So maybe not such a triumph over Nazism after all. The more I read, the more I found myself thinking about my own family's history and my own somewhat obsessive interest in finding out what had survived the war and what had been lost. My mother's family were Polish Jews, rooted for centuries in a land they knew intimately and considered home. I thought of my great, great grandfather Menachem Mendel Spiro. He grew up a devout Hasidic Jew, but as a young man he cut off his sidelocks, trimmed his beard, and embraced a world of secular knowledge. He set up a school for girls and became a renowned educator and a passionate linguist, already fluent in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, and Russian. He sat at his kitchen table late into the night, teaching himself Esperanto by candlelight, then Spanish, French, and German. His small apartment was crammed with books on all subjects, a library built up over 50 years. The books are long gone. At the age of 78, Menachem Mendel attempted suicide in the Warsaw ghetto, but failed and ended up dying in the Treblinka death camp. I only know about the library because I found a description of it in a memoir by a former pupil of his who survived the war. That's a much more typical wartime story than the miraculous survival of some valuable paintings. I thought of another relative, my cousin Paul, who I first met in Boston when he was in his 60s. Paul was a tough, plain speaking sort of guy, a survivor of the war and of life in general. He was the first adult I ever met With a concentration camp number tattooed on his arm. He'd made a new life for himself in the United States. But his most treasured possession was a single torn off cover from an old round fob watch. He unwrapped it proudly to show me. It was engraved with a photographic portrait of his grandfather, Moishe Asche, the family patriarch who had given all his 10 children an identical watch. Nine of them disappeared in the war at the age of 20. Paul had torn the inner cover off his watch and hidden it inside a windowsill in his home in the Polish city of Lodz before he was deported. He returned as a liberated survivor, persuaded the new occupants of his home to let him in and retrieve the sliver of metal from its hiding place. It's these stories, not the headline grabbing news of long lost paintings, that are the stuff of modern Jewish history. And not just Jewish history. The Second World War was a time of rupture, loss and uprooting on an epic scale. Family links were torn apart. Extended family networks accumulated over generations. So swept away and along with the people, a world of possessions heavy with the weight of memory and meaning. Behind this week's looted art discovery lies an intensely human story faced by millions of refugees, past and present. What would you take if you had to leave your home in a hurry? What are the treasured possessions that connect you to your past that you hope to pass on to future generations? What have the millions of Syrian refugees now shivering in makeshift camps, been able to take with them? What have they had to leave behind? And what state will their homes be in if they ever return? I imagine myself faced with these impossible choices. Would I hastily gather up family photographs or essential documents? Would I try and pack the fragile little clay elephant with oversized ears that my daughter made for me in art class? I don't know. I'm lucky that I've never had to make these choices. But I do know that for my family, a fragment of an old fob watch is every bit as precious as a painting by Picasso or Matisse.
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Presenter
And with those thoughts from David Mazauer, we've reached the end of another edition. I'll be back next week on both Thursday and Saturday mornings with more from correspondents around the world. Why don't you join us? Goodbye.