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From Our Own Correspondent
Heroes of Baghdad
00:27:58
Global viewpoints. In this edition: Kevin Connolly visits the Baghdad book market and...
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BBC Correspondent
This is a download from the BBC. It's from our own correspondent.
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Program Producer
We make one version of the program for the BBC World Service, but this is the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ad.
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Program Presenter
Hello Today. Read all about it. The true heroes of Iraq's years of bloody conflict. It's the Brazilian city with the world's largest slum population. And the battle over housing in so Paulo is becoming increasingly political. A question you just can't ask a 16 year old girl. Not even in a remote village in Burma's Irrawaddy delta. And on the beach in Mauritania, we learn why the language of love is all about fish. The Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki's confident he won enough votes in this week's election to hold onto his post. But it'll be weeks before the results published, and with parties bitterly divided, forming a government could take much long. April was one of the bloodiest months in the country for years. More than a thousand people were killed. Kevin Connolly says the way ordinary Iraqis go about their daily business amid the ever present threat of violence is nothing less than heroic.
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Kevin Connolly
The book market in downtown Baghdad is a joyful testament to the durability of the human spirit. The sellers spread their wares out like carpets of all the world's learning. Stretching from the covered walkways out into the middle of the pedestrianised street. It is an odd selection. There's a copy of Practical Electronics from the Pre Transistor Age, a handbook of civil engineering that would take two people to lift up, and a book with a picture of the tough but tragic French boxer Marcel Cerdan on the COVID He's the one who dated Edith Piaf and died in a plane crash on more than one stall. You find stacks of Mein Kampf in Arabic, which you can interpret in one of two ways. Adolf Hitler either has a disturbingly big print run in these parts since there are a lot of them, or gratifyingly low sales since they're still there. There are also a couple of copies of the autobiography of the former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The agent who handled his Middle Eastern sales in Arabic must have been quite a negotiator. There are more browsers than buyers, in truth, although I picked up a couple of things myself and was quite tempted by what looked like the Arabic version of an American self help book called With Engaging Directness. Don't be Sad. I think the English original might have had a slightly more inspirational title, but on your way into the street market, you pass through a four man police checkpoint in which the first officer has the grim job of searching people to make sure they're not wearing a suicide bomber's vest. The first one he finds, of course, will be the last thing he ever finds. And yet he sets about the task with a kind of brusque courtesy, which is rather impressive in the circumstances. In this baking, dusty, chaotic, friendly city, no warning bomb attacks have become so commonplace that they barely move the needle on the dial of international attention. When you're out and about, there's a curious feeling that sits somewhere near the back of your mind like a tune that you can't quite remember and can't quite get out of your head. It's not fear, exactly, more a heightened awareness of how fragile are the bonds that bind us to life and how easily they are broken. We all know all of that, all of the time, of course. It's why we look before stepping into the road. But for Iraqis, it seems painfully close to the surface of thought and it never seems to leave for for a moment. Nearly 8,000 civilians died here last year, mainly in suicide bombings or other sorts of no warning attacks. Attacks that grind down our ability as ordinary people to lead ordinary lives. That's getting on for three times the number of people who died on 9 11, and more than double the total number of deaths in the long agony of Northern Ireland's modern troubles. Think for a moment of the devastation and despair left in the wake of the OMA bombing, which killed 29 people in 1998. How we live to this day with the political, emotional, legal and human fallout from it. In the last few days alone in Iraq, there have been two bomb attacks that killed more people than Omer. In one explosion alone, 50 people died. All those lives lost and all the lives around and beyond them broken beyond repair. I have no idea if the Baghdad book market might ever be a target, and nor do the people who go there every week. A truckload of explosives was detonated outside the local tea shop a few years ago, killing dozens of people. But that's no reason to believe it won't happen again, or that it will either. It's the uncertainty that eats at everyone's nerves. No solution to any of this seemed to be available in these elections. Iraq, in truth, is drifting dangerously in the uncertain waters of the modern Middle East. Shia fighters leave here to fight for Bashar Al Assad in Syria. But then Sunni fighters come from elsewhere in the Middle east to join the insurgency against Iraq's Shia government in Anbar province in theory, the bomb attacks support that insurgency here. But in truth, the motive seems to be sectarian hatred. And the target? Daily life itself. Coffee shops and markets and cafes, which makes places like the Baghdad Book Market pretty special. The buyers and the sellers and the saunterers and the schmoozers don't look like they're doing anything exceptional. But there is a kind of heroism to be found in ordinary things done in extraordinary circumstances. Not the kind that wins medals, perhaps, but the kind of fatalistic ability to endure that gets you through a day. Londoners must have known it during the Blitz. Iraq is the kind of place that makes a mockery of optimism. But in the ability of its people to simply keep going, there is surely reason for hope.
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Program Presenter
And that was Kevin Connolly. Elsewhere in the Middle east, the long running peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians have, it seems, finally founded. The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, who spent months trying to close the divide between the two, has conceded that it's time for a pause in negotiations. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in a speech in Tel Aviv on Thursday, said he now planned to establish in law Israel's status as the national homeland of the Jewish people. Arab rejection of the Jewish state, he said, was at the heart of the conflict. Earlier, the two rival Palestinian factions, Fatah in the west bank and Hamas in Gaza, reached a deal they said would bring them back together. Jeremy Bowen's been considering how these developments will affect the long simmering discontent in the region.
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Jeremy Bowen
Gaza City has very few open spaces. The beach is the most popular. Many Palestinians in Gaza can't leave the narrow and overcrowded strip because of Israeli and Egyptian restrictions. At the beach, they can walk, swim in the Mediterranean, relax a little and wonder about a much bigger world. Somewhere between. Beyond the horizon, another oasis is the Gaza War Cemetery. 3 and a half thousand British and Commonwealth dead from the two world wars are buried there. And the Commonwealth War Graves Commission has performed its usual gardening miracle. Among the lines of limestone graves are flat green lawns, trees, and they've created some peace and shade in a dusty, noisy city built on sand Dunes. More than 15 years ago, I walked around the cemetery with a Palestinian man in his mid-20s. He told me it was the only place he could think. We were talking because he'd been tortured in a Palestinian jail. His fingernails had been torn out with pliers and had regrown as horny little stumps. He'd been accused of being an activist in Hamas. His torturers were from the Palestinian security forces, but that were dominated by men from Yasser Arafat's faction, Fateh. The peace process with Israel was still supposed to be moving ahead, and Arafat's people had cracked down hard on Hamas after a series of suicide bombs that had killed dozens of Israelis. Tension and worse between Hamas and Fatah has deep roots, so it was no surprise that it led to bloodshed after Hamas won an election in 2006. Palestinians were sick of Fateh's excesses, corruption, and ineptitude. Hamas is an acronym for the Arabic words for Islamic Resistance Movement. It's a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the group that's been working since the late 1920s to put Islam at the heart of political and social life in Muslim countries. The barman in the American colony, the hotel journalists like to use in Jerusalem, was a Muslim who didn't drink. He said back then that he'd known an electoral upset was coming when Christian Palestinians had told him over their whiskeys that they'd be voting for Hamas. Fatah and its allies in the west were aghast about the victory of Hamas. A senior American official told me in his office in the State Department in Washington that the priority was reversing the result. The Americans helped Fatah prepare a coup against the newly elected Hamas government. Hamas moved first, and amid brutal scenes, Hamas fighters unceremoniously ejected Fatter from the positions of power it still held in Gaza. Mohammed Dahlan was the fatter strongman in Gaza, someone the Americans relied on. His men had rounded up and tortured Hamas sympathisers in the 1990s, including the man I'd met in the British graveyard. I'd talked with Dahlan in his office not many months before. I saw TV pictures of exultant Hamas fighters smashing it up and firing their Kalashnikovs into his desk. He had escaped. Since then, the Palestinians have been divided, with Hamas in power in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank. I use the term in power advisedly. Israel is really in control in the west bank, and even though its troops and settlers were pulled out of Gaza nine years ago, it can still blockade the Gaza Strip in a way that is at times devastating for civilians. People in Gaza, in different ways, relied on tunnels dug into Egypt for everything from Coca Cola to weapons. Some tunnels were big enough to drive in cars and live animals. When the Muslim Brotherhood Hamas allies won the election in Egypt, Hamas was flying high. But now the Egyptian military says it's destroyed more than 1300 tunnels since it seized power last year. Hamas was running out of options. When it had left, was ending the split with President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah. His side had concluded that the latest round of talks with Israel was going nowhere, like all the others over 20 years or more. So unity seems to be part of a new strategy for President Abbas and his people. It includes joining international organizations, which could eventually lead to war crimes prosecutions of Israeli soldiers. And there's bds, or boycott, divestment and sanctions. The idea is for Israel to be as isolated as South Africa was in the 1980s. That worries the Israelis more and more. The editor of one of Israel's leading papers told me that BDS was moving from the fringes to the center of politics. Israel's so much stronger than us, one Palestinian activist told me before I left Jerusalem this week. But we're more organized than we were, and we're not going away.
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Program Presenter
Jeremy Bowen there's been more trouble in Brazil. Only weeks before the country's due to stage the World cup, police in Sao Paulo clashed with about a thousand homeless demonstrators. They're angry that the authorities have delayed promised housing improvements while spending billions on the football tournament which kicks off in their city on June 12. 20 million people live in and around so Paulo. Hundreds of thousands of them, lack proper housing. And as Katie Watson's been finding out, it's a huge problem in a city which has the largest slum population in the world.
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Katie Watson
Three weeks after moving to Sao Paulo, and after more than three years in the Middle East, I was surprised to find that my new digs weren't too far from the Gaza Strip and, as it happens, New Palestine too Confused? Well, I was too, until I learnt that these are nicknames for some of so Paulo's newer neighbourhoods. But unlike people in the original Gaza Strip who accuse Israelis of occupying their land, here in so Paulo it's housing movements who are doing the occupying, creating informal settlements on visible plots of land. These tent cities are the front line in the fight to improve the city's housing problems. On a nearby hillside, covered in tents, I met Rebecca. In her mid-30s, she's got two children, one of whom is autistic. She recently separated and couldn't afford her rent, so she came here casually dressed in shorts, T shirt and Brazilian flip flops, she welcomed me into her so called home. The tarpaulin tent is big enough for two beds, but there's no electricity. There's no proper sewage system either. And when it rains, she says, water pours through the roof. What's worse, though, she told me, is that the floor turns to mud. But her voice, along with those of a handful of socialist housing movements is fighting to be heard. Among the cheers of richer Palestanos, they've seen property values soar. On average, prices have risen 200% in the city in the past six years. But the quality of life for residents pushed to the suburbs has got worse. Fed up and with no sign of prices falling, squatters aren't confining themselves to occupying land. They're also taking over abandoned buildings in the centre of San Paolo, an area that wealthy people left long ago, but where rents still often exceed the minimum wage of just under £200amonth. I went to meet Welita, an articulate woman who had just given birth to her second daughter. She's in charge of an occupation in a 13 story commercial building in the heart of the City, home to 170 families. To enter the building, you have to identify yourself. Only when they're sure you pose no risk will the man behind the peephole remove the thick metal bar across the door and let you in. The stairs are dark and dingy, but the place is evidently looked after. There's a communal kitchen and bathroom on each floor, and people pay 40 pounds a month to live here. And there are signs throughout the building warning residents that drink and drugs aren't tolerated and everyone has to respect each other. Anyone misbehaving is thrown out and there's even a cleaning rotor everyone here mucks in. Welita describes it as a fight for dignity, not just by low income workers, but people who identify with the huge inequalities in the city and want to see change. You only need to look around Welita's flat to see the piles of books on politics and a framed image of the German anarchist Adolf Fischer, to realise that this is very much a political fight and one that's gaining momentum as prices keep rising. The government are investing billions in the World cup, she told me, nursing her baby in her arms. But they don't have the money to invest in education, in housing and health. When we sit down at the table with them, they say they don't have the funds. And so the fight continues. On the day I visited the occupation, many of the families had gone to another abandoned building that they had secured overnight. There was a standoff with police and the squatters won. When we arrived, people were tired and emotions were running high. There was a deafening cheer when Welita walked into the room. Some women were crying with gratitude. But when the keys to the empty rooms were handed out to families, those tears turned to smiles. Officials say they're working on the problem There are federal, state and local building programs. But Welita says that while the government's listening more than the previous administration did, it's more action she wants to see. Driving home from the occupation, we passed through one of Sao Paulo's richer neighbourhoods. Travelling along the hillside road, the issue of the haves and have nots was really brought home to me. On both sides of the road were dozens of luxury apartment blocks. My colleague pointed out one in particular. Each floor, he said, had a private swimming pool on the balcony and the view. They looked out on the rather ironically named Paradise City, one of Sao Paulo's biggest and more notorious favelas. This really was a case of the rich looking down on the poor.
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Program Presenter
And that's Katie Watson. Now, Mauritania, in the west of Africa, is a strikingly different country. Not like its Arab neighbors in North Africa, nor like the sub Saharan countries it borders. It cleaves fiercely to its own ancient desert culture. Once a French protectorate. It's striking how little has remained of decades of French influence beyond the odd cafe in the capital, which still knows how to turn out a good buttery croissant. The desert is where Mauritanians prefer to be in sipping mint tea, the men in their traditional robes, the women appearing against a landscape that's a hundred shades of brown in swathes of color like ice cream flavors, pistachio green and strawberry pink. The sands of the desert seem to run through people's veins here. And yet, as Chris Terrell's been finding out, there's a very different and watery side to Mauritania as well.
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BBC Correspondent
Traveling across the Sahara to Mauritania's Atlantic coast, I arrive at a place called Nuadibu. Here, where the desert meets the ocean, I see something that takes my breath away. Hundreds of multicoloured wooden boats crashing through the unrelenting surf towards the open sea. Men 20 to a boat hang on for dear life as their vessels are bucked skyward by waves Californian surfers might pray for. These are les Pecheur de Mauratanes, the fishermen of Mauritania and the country's best kept secret. A lot of Mauritanians don't know about them, but then, most Mauritanians have probably never even seen the sea. And yet off this coast are some of the richest fishing grounds in the world. In fact, thousands of fishermen work these perilous waters and have done for centuries. Their sturdy, open boats, about 40ft long, are painted in the brightest and breeziest of colours. But don't let that fool you. This Sort of fishing, mostly done at night when fish rise to the surface to feed, is incredibly dangerous. Men, indeed whole boats, are frequently lost at sea and never seen again. Les Pecheux de Maratanes, actually many from neighbouring Senegal and Gambia as well, are said to be fearless. So it's with some trepidation that I join a boat one night as it sets out for the ocean. There are no lights, charts or life jackets, but the crew, 23 strong, are sprinkling the boat with water from an old plastic bottle. It's magic water from a local witch doctor and will, I'm told, lead us to fish and protect us from danger. I try to look reassured. Powered by an old outboard motor, we head out accompanied by a sister boat. It's safer to hunt in pairs. The excitement is palpable. The men start stamping their feet and chanting, dole, dole, dole. Meaning we are the force. One young Gambian called Happy Happy tells me, we haven't caught anything for days, so need a big catch tonight. Four hours later and 10 miles out to sea, there's splashing in the water and the telltale glint of fish scales. Herring are jumping. The skipper shouts. A vast net, released over the side is dragged in a wide arc through the raging sea. Chanting in feverish rhythm, the crew start to pull the net in. Dole, dole. We are the force. Be strong like a man, not like a woman. Ok? It's not politically correct, but it's effective. Eventually, our sister boat comes alongside to help wrestle in a net bursting with thrashing fish. The waves smash us together repeatedly, Wood on wood crunch. Anyone falling in now would be instantly crushed. Dooley. Dooley. Work never killed a man. Pull the net in. Fish cascade aboard in their thousands. Soon we are up to our knees in them, then up to our waists and before long, literally up to our necks and slapping flapping herring. By dawn, the two boats full to the brim with dead fish and exultant fishermen put into a beach next to a massive fish factory where they process and freeze fish for export. Our seven tonnes of herring will translate to about £30 per crewman. Happy. Happy is well Happy. Men afraid of hard work turn to crime. He grins. Not us. We work for our rewards. The herring shoveled into crates are carried ashore on the heads of well muscled young men from the factory. Other species in the catch, groupers, octopus and small shark are sold to countless traders on the beach. Everyone wants a slice of the action. Children scamper in the shallows, pouncing on fish dropped from the crates. Old women, Fish wives argue about the price of octopus tentacles. Right now on this little stretch of beach in everything, and I mean everything, revolves around fish. The fishermen's girlfriends and wives are here to greet their men. What do they get for their trouble? Not flowers, not chocolates, but you guessed it, fish. Fish is the language of love here and it has to be said, the currency of lust too. Prostitutes wading into the sea are gifted fish by some of the well muscled young men on the promise of a good time later as a means of exchange. Fish is driving every transaction you could imagine, and probably quite a few you couldn't. So next time you think of Mauritania, don't think of camels and miles of endless desert. Think of multi coloured wooden boats crashing through massive Atlantic swells. And of fishermen chanting in vigorous unison as they take their chance on the savage sea.
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Program Presenter
And that was Chris Terrell. Now, Burma. Myanmar has seen the most extraordinary changes since the first general election in 20 years was held there in 2010. Its economy, which had been suffering from decades of stagnation, mismanagement and isolation, is developing fast. Offshore oil and gas deposits are being developed. Exports are booming. The country's a principal source of teak as well as jade pearls, rubies and sapphires. Tourism's an increasingly valuable commodity. Democracy there, however, remains fragile. And there are parts of the country which seem to be enjoying few of the fruits of change. Robin Lustig's been travelling in the densely populated south, hard hit by a cyclone back in 2008.
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Program Producer
There are some questions that no adult male should ever ask a teenage girl. And as I've just discovered, that's as true deep in the Irrawaddy Delta as anywhere else. Teenage girls, it seems, are the same the world over, whether they're living in comfort in Europe or struggling for survival. In a remote Burmese village, I met Thain thein Yane, a 16 year old schoolgirl, in the village of Torpai Lei. It's several hours by boat from the nearest road, no more than a collection of simple wooden huts next to one of the dozens of waterways that crisscross this region of Burma, where the Irrawaddy river splits into countless channels and streams flowing through lush paddy fields and mangrove forests. Before reaching the Andaman Sea. I noticed that she'd painted her fingernails green and for no particular reason, I asked her why. That's when she gave me the look that I instantly recognised from the days when I had a 16 year old daughter. It was a look that said, how can a grown man be so stupid and ask such an idiotic question. But she answered anyway. And if you know anything about teenage girls, you'll already have guessed what she said, because I like the colour green. Thain Thin Yane wants to be a lawyer. She knows it'll be a struggle, but if anyone can do it, I reckon she's got as good a chance as anyone else. She's clearly bright. She has poise and determination and an unmistakable don't mess with me manner. Six years ago, the Burmese delta was struck by one of the most devastating cyclones of modern times. Cyclonagus destroyed this region and it killed more than 140,000 people. Those who survived are still struggling to rebuild their lives. And that's where the Nyane comes in. She was just a child when the cyclone struck, but she remembers it as if it was yesterday. How the wind just got stronger and stronger. How it flattened the village. So that after a terrifying night, shivering in the cold, when they woke in the morning, no one recognised where they were. Everything had gone. The houses, the fishing boats, the livestock and the village school. So thay then Yane was sent away to school to stay with relatives in a village a couple of hours away by boat. That's how she was able to complete her education and can dream of going on to university to study law. Now, six years after Cyclone Nagis, her village is at last going to have its own school again. Thanks to the work of a London based charity. It's already built nearly 20 schools in the Delta region. Each one a simple one room wooden structure big enough to accommodate up to 100 children. I'd arrived in the village with a small group of the charity's benefactors, among them a man who managed to organize one of the most surreal gastronomic events I've ever witnessed. Picture the scene. We're in a remote Burmese village where for generations people have lived almost exclusively on a diet of rice and and fish. Then along comes David Rundle, who runs a meat importing business in South London and who's brought with him a bag full of German frankfurter sausages, some bread rolls and generous quantities of tomato ketchup and mayonnaise. A fire pit is dug in the hard dry earth. The sausages are cooked and soon the village children are in a state of high excitement. T shirts are handed out with David's company logo on them. On some of the younger children they reach all the way down to the ground because there's only one size xxl, extra extra large. I wasn't sure that the children would go for something as foreign to their palate as frankfurter's, smothered in ketchup and mayonnaise. But that was my second mistake of the day. They devoured them and they came back for more. If teenage girls are the same the world over, so are young children when there's free food on offer. I'd expected to find much more evidence of reconstruction in the delta. The villagers have managed to rebuild their houses, but apart from that, very little has changed, despite the country's recent political reforms. But green painted fingernails and frankfurter sausages? That wasn't at all what I'd expected.
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Program Presenter
A reporter's life. It's full of surprises. Robin Lustig in the Irrawaddy Delta, bringing this edition to a close. More stories. More surprises, too, I'll bet, next Saturday morning. Do join us. Goodbye.