← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Heroes and Villains
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Portia Walker: optimism in Yemen has been punctured by a devastating bomb blast in the...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC.
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This is from our own correspondent.
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You can hear the version of the
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program broadcast on the World Service by following the link to the BBC iPlayer
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To keep up with our latest reports and get a sneak preview of our stories, you can sign up to our
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Twitter feed as well.
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But now, presenting the BBC Radio 4
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edition, here's Kate 80. Today a state funeral's underway in Sicily. They're honouring a man who lost his life. Taking on the mafia. Gaudy mansions in green and orange. A Mexican town grown rich on the profits of sex trafficking. The Saudis billion dollar park scheme is having unexpected consequences. And they live in one of the world's finest cities. So how come the Viennese are world champions at grumbling, moaning and whingeing? The Italian premier Mario Monti yesterday called for a fight without mercy against the Mafia. He was speaking as thousands of people gathered in Sicily to mark the 20th anniversary of the killing of the senior judge Giovann. The judge's murder in a bomb attack marked a turning point in the authorities war against the Mafia. In the decades since, there have been many arrests, though the gangsters still wield considerable influence and Sicily continues to be associated with them. Alan Johnston has been to one town which in the world's imagination at least is forever linked with the Mafia.
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The scene is the immigration reception centre on Ellis Island, New York, back in the days when it was working flat out. Huge numbers of poor Europeans are disembarking from steamers. Among them is a young Sicilian who's come to see if he too might have a little of the American dream. He's called Vito Andolini, but he can't speak English and he can't answer when he's asked his name. So the immigration officer just gives him one. The name of the town that Vito's passport says he comes from. A town called Corleone. The scene is from one of the movies in the Godfather trilogy. And of course young Vito goes on to become the Mafia boss. Don Vito Corleone, one of the most memorable characters in cinema history. The films are fictional. Vito Corleone never existed. But the little town of Corleone certainly does. Set in the rolling hills of western Sicily. And it lives in the knowledge that for movie lovers all around the world, its name means only one Mafia. But Corleone can't just blame Hollywood for its reputation. It really has produced some of the most violent men that Sicily has ever known. Figures like the so called Boss of bosses Bernardo Provenzano and Salvatore Riina, who's also known as the Beast. They've been as ruthless as any character ever dreamed up in the movies. But how do the people of Corleone deal with this great weight of the most appalling publicity? Well, in purely business terms, the town's reputation is not such a bad thing. There's money to be made out of a bit of Mafia tourism, and there's a certain amount of cashing in. On a wall in the main square, there's a large poster of a scene from the Godfather. It's from that episode where Don Vito Corleone's son Michael hides out in the family's ancestral homeland. Played by Al Pacino, he stands in the Sicilian sun, a bottle of wine in one hand and a rifle in the other, handsome and menacing. And you sense that the few tourists who wander through the square probably appreciate that sort of thing. You feel that they've made the long and winding journey to Corleone not so much to visit its medieval churches. They've come for a little of the Godfather Frisson to be able to say they've been to the infamous Mafia town. But of course, there are those in Corleone who are repelled by everything that the gangsters represent. Among them is a middle aged trade union activist called Dino Paternostro. We met one afternoon on a bit of high ground overlooking the town, and as we chatted, he began to give me a sense of some of the tensions that were part of life in the streets below. He spoke of how people like him felt the burden of Corleone's reputation. The outside world, he said, thought everyone there was either in the Mafia or was a friend of the Mafiosi. Decent people felt trapped between their fear of the gangsters and the shame of being considered close to them. The Mafia is no longer the force it was in Corleone, Mr. Paternostro said, but it is still there. And when it shows its face, it can be ferocious. But just as it's true that the town's been a stronghold of the Mafiosi, itself also produce men who have confronted them. And that other decent side of Corleone has a hero. Way back in 1948, a local trade union man called Placido Rizzotto led farm workers in a struggle with the gangsters over control of land. He challenged the Mafia on its own doorstep, and he paid with his life. He was murdered and dumped somewhere in the countryside. But the dead man's family and his union colleagues never forgot the sacrifice he'd made. For decades, they pressed the authorities to search for and identify his remains. And just recently, they were indeed positively identified. As a Sicilian put it to me recently, it takes a hero to stand up to the Mafia. And the trouble is, not everyone is a hero. But Placido Rizzotto certainly was. And now, all these decades on, all of Italy is honoring him. At this moment, he's being given a state funeral in his hometown in the presence of Italy's Head of State, President Giorgio Napolitano. His remains are being laid in the soil of Corleone, the place where he made his stand. And the ceremony will show the world that the town hasn't only given rise to mafiosi. From Corleone have also come some of the finest kind of men.
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Alan Johnston. In Sicily, trafficking women from Mexico to the US and forcing them into prostitution has become a hugely profitable criminal enterprise. And there's one small town in central Mexico which is the hub of this brutal trade. It has, for four generations been home to the families who dupe unsuspecting young women and smuggle them north. Laura Trevelyan has been following the trail of these traffickers victims from new to the town of Tenancingo.
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At first sight, Tenancingo seems to be another quiet town in rural Mexico. But as you draw closer, the outskirts are dotted with vast, ostentatious mansions. Some are green, others are orange, and they're decorated with Ottoman style turrets and sculptures of swans. These garish homes are known locally as kalque, the houses of Assembly. Tenancingo is a town thriving on sex trafficking. For four generations, entire families here have grown rich by duping young women and selling them for sex in the United States. My journey to Tenancingo began in New York, where I met Alicia. She's a slight young woman with a smile that lights up the room. Despite all she's endured, like thousands of other women over the years, Alicia was targeted by a well dressed, wealthy sex trafficker from Tenancingo. He approached Alicia in Mexico City, showering her with affection and promising her a better life. Alicia was taken to Tenancingo, shown the gaudy mansions, and then smuggled to the United States. There, her pimp turned violent and told Alicia if she tried to run away, her family in Mexico would be harmed. For 18 months, Alicia was delivered like a pizza to men who paid to have sex with her. Drivers ferried her around Queens in New York, answering men who called the phone numbers printed on the advertising flyers. They called Chica Cards, which euphemistically advertise flowers and fruits for delivery. Alicia says she was forced to have sex with at least 5,000 men, some of whom beat her up. Alicia eventually ran barefoot into the street in Queens. One Department of Homeland Security official told me that 85% of the victims she sees in New York have been trafficked by Tenancingo pimps. Puzzled by how one Mexican town could be so dominant in the sex trafficking trade, I went to see Tenancingo for myself. Our driver was nervous from the moment we left Mexico City. The local police are corrupt there, he told us. We're going to be on our own in the middle of nowhere. It's not safe. About four towns out from Tenancingo. As we drove down a long and dusty road, past the donkeys and the men with sombreros, the atmosphere seemed to change. We felt as if we were being followed. We stopped at a petrol station and were quizzed by the attendant about what we were doing and where we were going. As we left, the man rushed to the telephone, seeming to call ahead with news. By the time we got to Tensingo, all was menacingly quiet. We drove past the vast mansions of the sex traffickers, incongruous in a town full of shacks. Our driver grew steadily more anxious and feeling unsafe for reasons we couldn't quite define, we left. Later, in Mexico City, I asked a government official why no one arrests the sex traffickers who live so openly in Tenancingo. The official smiled gently and explained that the traffickers have a network of informants in Tenancingo and the towns nearby. The informers immediately tell the traffickers about any strange number plates or suspicious looking visitors. By the time the federal officials get to Tanansingo, the traffickers are nowhere to be seen. The whole town knows, Alicia told me. They're all accomplices. Alicia has bravely told her story because she wants to expose the world of the Tenancingo traffickers and stop them brutalising more young women. Mexico's government has passed strong anti trafficking laws and set up an office dedicated to helping victims of violence. But changing a culture where corruption often flourishes at a local level takes time. In New York, US officials have arrested numerous Tenancingo traffickers. Getting them convicted isn't easy. The victims of trafficking have a complicated relationship with their pimps, who've often fathered their children. The women are terrified of their pimps and tied to them, which means they're often reluctant to testify in court. Far from the orange mansions of Tenancingo with their white balustrades and tinted windows, Alicia is starting a new life in America. Never trust a man, she says. Don't believe the pretty things they say.
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Laura Trevelyan in New York Saudi Arabia isn't usually held up as an example of a place which leads the world in the field of urban renewal. But a huge project in the capital, Riyadh, has been exciting scientists and town planners the world over. The task was a daunting one. What could be done to a valley that had fallen victim to the city's rapid growth and become a public rubbish tip and health hazard? The answer proved to be spend a great deal of money transforming it into a lavish parkland complete with lakes and walkways. Matthew Tellers mean to have a look
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down by the lake. Hussein al Dawsri is beaming. Before all this, he said, there were no services here, no trails, no routes. An athletic 30 something in sunglasses and white T shirt, Adossuri stretches his arms wide to show me the landscape of trees and open water that forms Wadi Hanifa, a shimmering lake in the unlikely setting of an industrial suburb of South Riyadh. For years treated as a dumping ground and open sewer, the Hanifa Valley has been the focus for an award winning 10 year restoration project. It has plenty of fans in the hot, dry Saudi capital now. I come here all the time, says Hussain al Dawsri. It feels like the opposite of Riyadh. Rising in the highlands of central Arabia, Wadi Hanifa runs southeast for 75 miles before losing itself in the sands of the Empty Quarter. This great watercourse is dry for most of the year, but fertile thanks to aquifers close to the surface. People have been farming and trading up and down the valley for millennia. As a village and then a small town, Riyadh grew sustainably with its population. But from the 1970s, rapid growth quickly overwhelmed the city's ecosystems. Construction firms mined Wadi Hanifa for minerals. The valley was blocked by encroaching farmland. Seasonal flooding swept pollutants into residential neighbourhoods and then left stagnant water, jeopardising public health. Yet today, Wadi Hanifa shows few signs of its polluted past. At Al Elb on Riyadh's scorched northern outskirts, I walked along Wadi Hanifa. Beside high desert bluffs, palm trees now shade a line of carefully designed picnic pods, each comprising a horseshoe of roughly finished limestone slabs offering secluded valley views. More slabs laid horizontally, create steps down to the valley floor, where children scamper along nature trails and families lounge under the acacias. Riyadh has no open space. Engineer Saud Al Ajmi told me Wadi Hanifa has become a place to breathe. Since 2001, the Al Riyadh Development Authority has been restoring and redeveloping the valley, clearing rubbish, grading the banks, landscaping and replanting native flora. In other big cities, you might head up to high ground for a breath of air. In Riyadh, you head down. Wadi Hanifa acts like a flue, drawing cool breezes over the city to disperse smog and temper the heat. It's a very long, very thin oasis. Negotiating Riyadh's ceaseless traffic brought me to the project's defining idea. Overlooked by criss crossing flyovers, a new facility is transforming urban runoff into water clean enough for irrigation and fishing. It uses bioremediation, applying natural processes to repair environmental damage. Here, Canadian landscape architects, working with British engineers, have created a linked series of wetland habitats. Within three large ponds, algae form the basis of a food web that includes fish, insects and mollusks. Aided by natural oxygenation, it effectively removes harmful bacteria and other pollutants from the water flowing through. It's a startling process to observe where dirty water enters and clean water departs without any human intervention in between. It has also never before been attempted on this scale. Indeed, now that bioremediation has been proved to work in Riyadh, scientists are studying how to transfer the technology to other cities. The Wadi Hanifa scheme has benefited the environment and the economy, bringing gentrification to previously unfashionable neighbourhoods alongside the valley. But it has also reconnected the Saudi capital with a key aspect of its self identity. Wadi Hanifa is where Riyadh was born. Yet for years, it was a source of shame. The cleanup has restored pride. There's an element of what some call greenwash to all this. Almost a billion pounds has been sunk into a headline making scheme for a city where I was told up to a third of households remain unconnected to mainline sewerage. And of course, there was no public consultation. As one advisor delicately put it, Riyadh is able to provide a green light for schemes that might take a lot longer in other countries. And the creation of a green corridor of parkland and lakeside promenades through the middle of the Saudi capital is also having unexpected social consequences. The authorities are realizing that they simply cannot police such a large area. By tradition, Riyadh has no public entertainment, no cinemas, theaters or music. So the only leisure venues are shopping malls and parks. Picnicking is big in Saudi Arabia and down in the cool, shaded Hanifa Valley beside flowing water, there are signs of unusual change. Saudis and foreigners are starting to mix in a way unthinkable before women are even unveiling with impunity. Environmental conservation in Saudi Arabia has the potential, it seems, to offer benefits not just to birds and animals.
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Matthew Teller in Riyadh the television pictures of the suicide bomb in Yemen earlier this week were particularly horrific. 90 soldiers were killed as they rehearsed for a military parade. 200 others were injured. A statement was issued soon after from the group calling itself Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, saying it was responsible. It threatened more attacks if the army continued its offensive against Al Qaeda linked militants in southern Yemen. The bombing comes only months after the country's president was ousted in a popular revolt, and Portia Walker says the optimism which accompanied his demise is steadily evaporating.
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There must have been tens of thousands of men in Change Square on that spring day last year. They were kneeling in long geometric rows that stretched down the surrounding streets as far as the eye could see. It was a Friday morning, and they had gathered to pray together before their protest began. I reached the front of the tightly packed lines of men just in time to catch the end of the prayers. Allahu Akbar, God is great, the men recited. Then a long pause. Then they raised their fists in the air together and shouted, the people want the fall of the regime. Even in the glare of the south Arabian sunlight, I shivered a little. The Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, had just stepped down after 18 days of protests in Cairo. There were crowds on the streets of Benghazi calling for Colonel Gaddafi to go. President Ben Ali had fled Tunisia for Saudi Arabia, and the long standing leaders who had ruled this region for decades suddenly looked vulnerable. And here in Sana', a, this ancient city of stone tower houses and smiling children, it finally seemed as if Ali Abdullah Saleh, the former tank commander who'd ruled Yemen for 32 years, was about to step down, too. In the end, it was to take many more months and the loss of many lives before Saleh agreed to a deal that saw him hand over power to his deputy in November last year. And he remains in Yemen, living in the capital, his relatives and cronies retaining senior positions in the army and government. Today, the future seems more uncertain than ever. We were promised that Yemen would become more stable. We've really been shaken by this bomb, said Maazen Sultan, a young Yemeni man, when I called him shortly after Monday's blast in the capital Everybody is clinging onto what they have at the moment because the future doesn't look promising. Marsin works for a travel company. Back in the early days of the revolution, he had high hopes for Yemen's tourism sector. We had been expecting a lot of visitors, he told me when we spoke. It's a big disappointment. A tourist boom in Yemen always sounded improbable. The place is better known for its Al Qaeda cells and fierce tribesmen than its mountain scenery and ancient cities. But this desperately poor corner of the Arabian Peninsula has always been full of surprises and problems. During his last years in power, Ali Abdullah Saleh was sometimes accused of clinging to the threat posed by Al Qaeda to justify his long rule. Without him, he argued, the country would collapse into anarchy and become a haven for militant groups. He claimed to be the only person who could control Yemen's warring tribesmen and contain the conflicts with a breakaway Shia group in the north, an autonomous movement in the south, and the pockets of Al Qaeda fighters scattered the country. As the protests gathered pace last year, President Saleh said that he had to bring his soldiers back to the cities to quell the crowds that filled the streets calling for change. In the army's absence, it was said that Al Qaeda had taken over entire towns. In recent weeks, the military has been fighting back. Supported by US Advisors who provide communications equipment and satellite surveillance, the soldiers have been trying to recapture that terrain. We all anticipated that there would be some kind of revenge, but we didn't know when or how. Martin told me, and he has suspicions about the bombing. The authorities blame everything on Al Qaeda, he complained. It's a complicated and murky picture. I think that Yemenis were not fully prepared for what's come with this change, Marsden admitted. But I believe in the revolution, he said. Change had to happen sooner or later. I remembered speaking last year to a young man in a white robe, one of the leaders of those protests that took place every day in Sana'. A. The demonstrators included students, tribesmen, even young women. They'd gather outside the university, people with so little in common other than their desire to see Saleh go. Adel Al Sarabi told me back then that the current unity might not last for long. After the revolution, everyone will have their own agenda, he warned.
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And that was Portia Walker. Now, can it really be true that people who live in the most perfect of places moan the most? Well, if you can believe what the international surveys tell you, one of the world's very best places in which to live is Vienna, the capital of Austria. Year after year it scores top marks for safety, cleanliness, and public services. Our correspondent there, Bethany Bell, says that while many Viennese are fiercely proud of their city, they often seem unhappy with their lot. And they don't mind you knowing it.
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The Volksgarten in central Vienna is a particularly beautiful spot. The public garden, with its fountains and shady chestnut trees, is surrounded by some of Vienna's most magnificent buildings the neo Gothic town hall, Parliament with its classical columns, and the Baroque splendours of the Hofburg palace, once home to the Habsburg emperors. And in May and June, its formal flower beds are filled to bursting with a riotous display of multicolored roses. Once, as I was wandering through the rose garden, I fell in step behind a couple of elderly Viennese ladies who were taking their two small dogs for a walk. There'd been a storm the night before, and the grass was scattered with rose petals, although most of the flowers had survived well. But one of the ladies shook her head dismally. Look, she said in strong Viennese dialect. Alice schon for bay. It's all over now. Her companion sighed. Yah, yah, leide. Unfortunately, the Viennese tendency not to look on the bright side of life still catches me by surprise. Perhaps it's a sign that I'm still a foreigner, even after living here for more than 10 years. To be discontented is, of course, human the motor, some would say, of progress. But in Vienna, many people seem to cultivate and even wallow in their dissatisfaction. They have a special word for it, rauntzen, which roughly translates as to grumble, moan, or whinge. It's all the more remarkable to an outsider when you consider how good life is for most people here, not just for the city's wealthy and middle class, but for its poorer citizens as well. Vienna is one of the best run cities I know. It is, in comparison to many other European capitals, a safe place. Most of my female friends think nothing of walking home alone late at night. Decades of socialist led administrations have brought in generous and affordable housing and other public services. Turn on the tap and you get mountain spring water piped in from the Alps. But to hear some Viennese, it would be easy to come away with the impression that the place is going steadily downhill. Nix is vie fre. Nothing is the way it used to be is a constant refrain at the sausage stands and bars. This month, while much of Europe is in the grip of austerity measures, Vienna permanently lowered the price of a yearly ticket on its clean and efficient public transport system from €449 to €365, basically a euro a day. Thousands of extra yearly passes have now been sold. However, this being Vienna, it didn't take long for the complaints to start. Some are upset because the price of individual journeys has now gone up, and over the past few weeks I've been told time and again that the underground will now be insufferably crowded and that no one will ever get a seat on a tram again. You mustn't take all this moaning too seriously, a friend told me as we sat on a tram on the Ring Boulevard. It's just a way of letting off steam. But another Viennese wasn't so sure. Deep down, some of them do mean it, he said. If you live here all the time, you've got nothing to compare it to, and you don't know how good you've got it. It's a bit of a problem for the Social Democrats, he told me. They've been losing ground to the far right in recent years. He looked up from his coffee cup, smiling wryly. It's hard for them because the one thing you must never do when someone is ralsing is to tell them how well off they really are. A few years ago, I arrived back in Vienna after spending a couple of months reporting from a conflict zone in the Middle East. At the airport, I caught a taxi home. The next 30 minutes the driver told me in vivid detail how dreadful life in Vienna had become. How dirty, how crowded, how expensive, how rude. Perhaps it was because I was tired, but I snapped. You have no idea, I said fiercely, how lucky you are to live in this place. It's beautiful. Things work here. You have great hospitals. It's clean and it's safe. The driver didn't bother to reply. He just snorted, and I knew exactly what that snort meant. Bloody foreigner.
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Bethany Bell there, giving a Viennese taxi driver something else to moan about. That's it. More from our own correspondence here on Saturday morning. Do join us.