← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Jan 21, 2012
00:28:16
BBC correspondents don't often go out gardening -- perhaps that's because it gives a...
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- [00:00]
Kate Adie
You are listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent. You can hear the version of the program broadcast on the BBC World Service by going from our own correspondent website, or indeed to that of the BBC World Service. But here's the edition which goes out on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Program Narrator
Today, the west looks on as Yemen falls apart and Al Qaeda fills the vacuum. The Indian children working in dangerous conditions, producing cotton for high street shops in the West. Violence, scandal, gossip, hair transplants, all on a packed news agenda in Pakistan. And why a lemon tree has pricked the conscience of our man in Jerusalem. But first, officials in Washington say the United States is considering closing its embassy in Damascus because of increasing safety concerns. Arab League ministers, meanwhile, are starting two days of meetings in Cairo to decide the future of their monitoring mission to Syria, which has been widely criticized for failing to halt the fighting. More than 5,000 people have been killed and many more injured since the pro democracy campaign erupted last March. Jeremy Bowen has just sent us this dispatch from Damascus.
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Jeremy Bowen
Someone has pinned a poster up at the foreign passports window at the Syrian border post with Lebanon. It shows a dove of peace surrounded by guns, each labeled with the name of a foreign news broadcaster. One gun belongs to the BBC. The dove is surrounded and under fire, but the bullets are bouncing off its feathers, which are the color of the Syrian flag white, red, green and black. As usual, I've had nothing but courtesy since I arrived in Syria, even though the official line here set by President Bashar Al Assad is that its troubles are caused by a foreign conspiracy aided and abetted by the international media. The other day, the BBC went on a government trip to Dera, the town where the uprising started in March last year. We managed to leave our escort of secret policemen to have a quick talk with a group of defiant young men. They said they lived in a street of martyrs where 18 had been killed in the last 10 months. As we left them, they were chanting, bashar, we want to hang you. About half an hour later, back with the minders from the Ministry of Information, a rumour started circulating that the BBC had an undercover team in Daraa as well as us, because they'd been seen meeting protesters. It was nonsense, of course, but the first assumption was that it was true. Yet more proof of the foreign conspiracy. When the bus got back to Damascus, I went to the Ministry. Some building work was going on in the entrance hall, which is dominated by a gigantic bust of Bashar's father, Hafez, who was the first assad President Hafez Al Assad was ruthless. He dealt with attempted revolts by crushing them if necessary, sending in the tanks. He ended more than 20 years of coups after he seized power in 1970, and by the time he died in 2000, no one could challenge his wish to pass the presidency on to his son. The bust of Hafez al Assad at the Ministry is covered in dust. Somehow I imagine its prudent employees would have kept it shiny in his day. The system he built is now under colossal strain. Syria is in its worst crisis since independence in 1946. In his time of trouble, Bashar has fallen back on his father's methods. But they don't work in quite the same way in the modern world. When the first President Assad eliminated a revolt led by the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama in 1982 by sending in the army and killing at least 10,000 people, no one was putting videos on YouTube as it happened, the deed was done by the time the details were known. The wiring of the world for instant communication has made it more transparent. Authoritarian leaders in the 21st century can still get away with a lot, but only if they have the right friends. At the moment, Bashar al Assad does not. I had dinner the other night with a senior official I've known for a few years. He's a charming, educated man who argues that President Assad is not being given the chance by the world's big powers to reform the regime. He said the the west is applying its usual double standards to what's happening here. We met on the day that David Cameron called President Assad a wretched tyrant. Hypocrisy, said my contact, why doesn't Britain speak out in the same way when civilians are killed in Bahrain? The reason, he said, was that it didn't want to offend its Saudi allies and their friends in Bahrain's ruling family. The west, he said, should realize that only President Assad can save Syria from sectarian civil war. But there are plenty of people here in Syria who believe that the president had a decade of chances to reform, and he chose not to take them. They think that in Zabedani, a small town half an hour's drive from the presidential palace in Damascus, armed rebels there have forced a ceasefire on the regime, and for now, at least, the protesters control the town. When I stood with them on a bitterly cold evening in the town's main square as they celebrated, I could hardly believe what I was seeing so close to Damascus. President Assad's forces are still strong, but it might already be too late for him to discard his father's rule book.
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Program Narrator
It isn't working anymore, and that's Jeremy Bowen in Syria. Further south Yemen is supposed to be holding a presidential election next month, which could mark the final departure of the country's longtime ruler, Ali Abdullah Saleh. Democracy activists hope it will put the Arab world's poorest country firmly on the road to reform. But there are now doubts about whether the poll will take place and signs that an Al Qaeda inspired insurgency is gaining ground in the southeast of the country. Stephen Sacher has just returned from Yemen's southern port city Aden, where he found evidence that this volatile corner of the Arab world is descending into chaos.
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Stephen Sacher
When the morning bell sounds inside the Bir Ahmed Middle School in Aden, no one cares nor moves. The classrooms are full not with students but with listless refugees, families from the jagged hill country of southeast Yemen who've laid bedding where the desks used to be and hung sheets from the walls to hide their women folk from strangers prying eyes. Mansoor Al Arabi has been in this school for eight months, along with his wife Dowlah and seven children. This proud farmer of sheep, apricots and sesame oil is now dependent for survival on a monthly food handout from the United Nations. Mansoor's misfortune was to live close to the town of Zinjibar, provincial capital of Yemen's Abyan province. Last May, it was overrun by fighters from Ansar Al Sharia, widely seen as a front for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, perhaps the most potent offshoot of the global jihadi network. Many residents fled. Those who didn't found their homes under attack as the Yemeni military pounded the rebels with airstrikes and heavy artillery. When we left, we had to step over the bodies of the dead on the road, dowler told me. We are desperate to go home, but we can't. More than 160,000 civilians have been forced to flee as the insurgency has spread. Yemen, the Arab world's poorest country, riddled with corruption and lacking any semblance of a coherent national government, is disintegrating. Tens of thousands of destitute refugees have flooded into Aden. The city's schools have been commandeered to provide them with shelter, and that has pleased neither the refugees, who claim they're desperately short of food and water, nor the city's resident population. How much longer do we have to put up with this? The headmistress of Bir Ahmed School yelled at me. We want our building back, and if we don't get it. The there is going to be an explosion here. Aden, a half forgotten remnant of Britain's imperial past, clings to the rim of an ancient volcano jutting into the Arabian Sea. These days, it feels beleaguered, angry and increasingly lawless. During my recent stay, two policemen were gunned down close to the port and four protesters were killed at a demonstration demanding secession for South Yemen. When I went to see a senior UN official in his capacious compound, it housed the British Embassy. During the days when South Yemen was an independent Marxist republic, I found him supervising the construction of blast walls around the front entrance. He pointed towards the blue waters of the Gulf of Aden and said, three days by boat and you've reached the Somali coast. Yemen is Somalia in the making. I drove east out of Aden on the main road toward Zinjibar to see just how far the Sana' a government writ now runs. Within 20 minutes, I was stopped at a military checkpoint. You must turn around, the local commander told me. Go any further and we cannot protect you. You will be killed. A short time later, word came through of another town taken by the jihadi insurgents, this time just 100 miles from the capital, Sana'.
- [09:59]
Jeremy Bowen
A.
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Stephen Sacher
Many in the south believe the Al Qaeda threat is being tacitly encouraged by the country's longtime ruler, President Ali Abdullah Saleh. He was supposed to have relinquished power after months of popular protest inspired by the Arab Spring. But he hasn't yet left the presidential palace and there are hints that elections may have to be postponed as the security situation deteriorates. Saleh and his allies have consistently used the spectre of Al Qaeda to drum up support for their discredited regime. Now it's the only card they have left. And if that is Saleh's game, it spells danger not just for Yemen, but the wider Arabian Peninsula. Aden's battered harbour looks out on some of the most strategically important shipping lanes in the world. The that's why a British expeditionary force first occupied this rocky outpost 173 years ago. It's why Western warships still patrol the waters off Yemen's coast and why America's most sophisticated surveillance equipment is trained on this southernmost corner of the Arab world. In the coming months, the fear is they will be watching, powerless, as Yemen sinks deeper into chaos.
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Program Narrator
Stephen Sacher. And you can see the film he's been making in Yemen in hard talk on Tuesday on the BBC News Channel. Now, it's been a tumultuous week in Pakistani politics. The national assembly was asked to vote in favour of democracy. It did, but by no means unanimously. The Prime Minister was required to face contempt proceedings in the Supreme Court. The President faces accusations of corruption while the Government is being blamed for trying to shield him from investigation. But his own Bennett Jones has been discovering many Pakistanis have become used to living with a constant sense of turmoil at the top.
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Kate Adie
When great institutions of state clash, history is made the stuff of school history lessons, the Magna Carta, the Star Chamber, the Great Reform act, that kind of thing. But while in the UK such milestones have generally been once a century type events, in Pakistan they've become a way of life. Constitutional crises have become business as usual. This week the Prime Minister was forced to appear before the Supreme Court. He was there to face contempt proceedings related to the President's immunity from prosecution. I'll spare you the details, but as I sat in the Court's press gallery, I felt pretty sure that in a hundred years time, Pakistani schoolchildren won't be learning about the January 2012 contempt case. Perhaps they'll be studying something the Western journalists didn't even know was happening. A debate, perhaps between some clerics on what role Islam should have in the state. But the court was colourful. There was the Prime Minister alongside him, his brilliant lawyer Aitzar Zaissen, and a throng of ministers showing solidarity and buzzing about all of them, the journalists, representatives of Pakistan's new irrepressible 24 hour news TV culture. For millions of Pakistanis, the constant wrangling of the elite has the quality of a TV soap. I don't want to belittle the importance of politics. The failure of successive elected and military governments has left millions of Pakistanis highly frustrated. But still, the TV news shows attract massive audiences. People both despair of their leaders and want to know all about them. And because many of the political parties are little more than family businesses, the same names have been around for decades. With power passed from father to daughter, brother to brother and so on. And all this against a backdrop of corruption cases, the frequent imprisonment of politicians, the the war on terror, suicide attacks, assassinations, US military incursions. There is so much going on, Pakistani news anchors can pirouette from the big news, the Prime Minister's day in court, to the tittle tattle, the affairs, the hair transplants, the family rows. Will the generals and judges force the President from power? Is he really sacrificing a goat every day for good luck? And who is he grooming as his political heir? His son Bilal? Or the latest theory, his youngest daughter, Asifa. And so it goes on. A small number of Pakistanis have fought their way to the top without the benefit of powerful relatives such as Hossein Haqqani, until recently Pakistan's Ambassador in the United States. His political antennae are so acute he's normally 10 moves ahead of everyone else. Unfortunately for him, he appeared to overreach recently with a complicated manoeuvre designed to get the US administration to help the civilian government rein in the army. It backfired and now he's living under virtual house arrest in the Prime Minister's residence, saying he knows too much and fears he'll be killed. One of Hussein Haqqani's main accusers is a multi millionaire businessman, attempted peace negotiator in places such as Kashmir and and all purpose political operator Mansouri Jaz. Now he has turned out to be a great guest star in the never ending national drama, having written a Financial Times op ed which accused Haqqani of conniving against the military and almost forced the fall of the government. He then turned up this week in a video that flashed around Pakistan in a matter of minutes. It showed him at a semi nude wrestling match between two women. The very well heeled, slightly Euro trashy audience cheered and booed as the women writhed in the ring. With the man himself, Mansoori Jaz, providing a blow by blow commentary. You couldn't make it up. Another long standing character might soon land a major part. Imran Khan. The former cricket star turned politician has hunky good looks, a deep aristocratic drawl and a beautiful home complete with courtyards and a whole pack of dogs on a hill overlooking Islamabad. For years, Pakistan experts have told everyone he's got no serious political base. But then, after two massive public rallies, everyone's now talking about him. Has his time come? There are so many others. Gutsy journalists breaking stories, feeble ones cultivating the mullahs, firebrand lawyers challenging the establishment, pompous judges, preening army officers and always the venal politicians. Of course Pakistani politics matter. They matter to millions of people who ache for good, decent leadership. But as many of those people would be the first to say, it's also quite a show.
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Program Narrator
And that's Owen Bennett Jones. Hundreds of thousands of children in India are working, some in dangerous conditions, processing cotton bound for high street shops. In this country. Many of the children are kept out of school. Some aren't even being paid. Campaigners say the big UK clothing stores should do much more to stop child labour being used in their supply chains. Humphrey Hawksley has been to investigate in one of the main cotton producing areas, Gujarat in western India.
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Humphrey Hawksley
In a lush green field speckled with white flowering buds, a little girl in a dirty yellow dress, her eyes squinting against overhead sun, her arms covered in scratches from her work, speaks in monosyllables about her life. Kali isn't from here and she's no idea where her parents are. She has a child's face, but any playfulness seems long drained from it. Her expression is dulled, her movements robotic as she prizes open the dark green bud. Pristine, raw cotton springs out. It's like the cotton wool we buy in our chemists shops. Carly drops it into a sack and opens another bud. She thinks she's 10 years old, but she's not sure. She's illiterate and she doesn't go to school. One of perhaps half a million children who work in the cotton industry in India, and there are several million around the world. No one knows how many because no real checks are made. But driving around northern Gujarat, children in cotton fields are easy to find. Kali is at the bottom end of a global supply chain whose top end finishes in our high street stores and fashion show catwalks. The next stage is the factory. Inside, you get what Labour activists describe as the horror of the white cloud. Cotton dust is so dangerous that it can cause chronic lung problems at an early age. We visited three factories, but I don't plan to name them in order to avoid repercussions against the workers. The sites were all pretty much the same, and despite what we saw, managers insisted that everything was in order. Raw cotton is pushed down into machines that process it to be made into thread. It's called ginning. The air is thick with cotton dust. My chest tightened immediately. My throat became irritable and my eyes began to water. The noise was deafening. The workers were mainly women and young girls. Some looked no more than 10 or 11. None had masks or safety clothing. Next to the machine room in one factory was a warehouse where young men and boys were piling cotton into baskets that were carried out on their heads, the white fluff and stuck to their skin, their hair and their clothes. Another factory had an old machine whose logo announced it was made in Manchester. It brought to mind William Blake's description of Britain's dark satanic mills in the early 19th century, when he may have been referring to working conditions during the Industrial Revolution. Many of those old factories closed down long ago, but because the quality of life was unacceptable for the workers there. But that poses the question, given the present trend towards globalisation why similar working conditions are still common for children in India and elsewhere. Despite phone calls and emails, none of the main retailers in Britain agreed to be interviewed about their cotton supply chains. Some did issue statements saying they didn't tolerate abuse and were committed to fair labour practices. The British government said it supported all activity to ensure better conditions for those working to supply UK companies. This muted response is not unusual, and the activists who guided us around Gujarat said they had been asking for help for years, but without success. What perhaps is surprising, though, is how little has changed over the centuries in Gujarat. I happen to be carrying Voltaire's satirical novel of his optimistic adventurer, Candide, in which he describes a meeting between his hero and a desolate sugar worker in South America who comments simply on his work and his injuries. It's the price we pay for sugar you eat in Europe, he says. Candide was published in 1759. More than 250 years later, I met 23 year old Gohill Magambai, who started work when he was 12 and lost a thumb in a ginning machine. And at the last site we visited we found Priyanka and Versha. They huddled up outside against the factory wall as they told their stories. Like Karlie, their homes were far away. They both said they were 11 years old, sent here by their parents and trafficked in through a labor agency. They never saw their wages. The money went straight to their parents after the agent took a cut. It was impossible not to reflect on Voltaire and ask whether the plight of Cali, Gohill, Priyanka and Versha is simply the price they pay for the cotton we buy in Europe.
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Program Narrator
Humphrey Hawksley the Middle east is a region where most land is desert and where droughts are commonplace, so the issue of how water is used and shared is hugely this week the debate has been about consumption on the west bank of the River Jordan. A French parliamentary report claimed that the 2.3 million Palestinians who live on the west bank use less water than the 450,000 or so Israeli settlers there. The Israeli government says the report is vicious propaganda, but it did focus attention on how this scarce resource should be managed. And in an area where water is generally in short supply, even individual gardeners face ethical questions about how much to use. Here's Kevin Connolly in Jerusalem.
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Kevin Connolly
There is a quiet satisfaction in the patient husbandry of traditional gardening, that gentle and miraculous coaxing of new life from the unpromising earth. But there is a rapid and more convenient satisfaction to buying your shrubs and trees already fully grown. The joy we felt in watching our lemon tree being manoeuvred off the back of a flatbed truck by two burly delivery men was surely very similar to the joy you would feel in growing it from seed. It just took half an hour rather than half a lifetime. There is an economic issue, admittedly. So far the tree has yielded four lemons, and I think they cost about a hundred pounds each. But I am obviously hoping that the average price will fall over time. For all the fragile grace with which it dances in the chilly winter winds, the tree conceals an astonishing number of thorns beneath its gentle leaves. And although at the moment it's pricking my conscience more than my fingers, the problem is, like most balcony gardeners in Israel, we've installed a miniature irrigation system to keep the lemon tree alive in the brutal heat of summer. It doesn't amount to much more than a couple of metres of brown plastic piping and a timer attached to a tap. But every time I hear the muted sloshing of another carefully calibrated dose, the desert around us feels a little drier. Often, the water issue here is reported as part of the broader tension between Israelis and Palestinians. A French parliamentary report, for example, recently concluded that the 450,000 Israeli settlers who live on the west bank of the River Jordan, in defiance of international opinion, use more water than the 2.3 million Palestinians whose home it is. The fairness, or lack of fairness, with which resources are shared is important, of course. But there is a larger issue which may in the end be more important still. That is the alarming way in which the amount of water in the lakes and rivers which support life for everyone here is dwindling. The River Jordan carries water south from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea, passing as it does through Palestinian, Jordanian and Israeli land. These days, the Jordan in many places is hardly more than a listless and polluted dribble. But there is plenty of evidence that it was once very different. Halfway along the valley, for example, there is a hydroelectric power plant, long since abandoned. It's a sobering thought that once the river waters turned its mighty turbines, when these days they are hardly potent enough to moisten a handkerchief. And we have the writings of the 19th century American naval officer William lynch, who in the 1840s, rather surprisingly, persuaded the government of the United States to fund an expedition down the Jordan Valley. He talks of rapids, frequent and most fearful, and of waves like the hammers of the titans. Even allowing for the need to persuade his fellow Americans that they were getting full value for their tax dollars, it's clear there was a lot more to the Jordan back then. That's partly because these days Israel pumps water out of the Sea of Galilee to feed its national supply system, and partly because neighboring Arab countries use water from the rivers that feed the Galilee. The effect on the river Jordan is measured best by watching what's happening to the level of the Dead Sea into which it flows. It's shrinking by a meter a year. It's only about two thirds of the size it was in the 1930s. The ancients once believed it was certain death to try to sail across the Dead Sea. Give it another hundred years or so and you'll be able to step over it. So something has to be done. And attitudes to water in the Middle east are not always rational. There's the whole debate about how much sense it makes to grow non native plants like bananas and oranges for a start, and I wince when the lawn sprinkler system at my apartment complex switches itself on. Then there are the televised golf tournaments from elsewhere in the desert played on the lushest of grass, its bunkers, sand traps, not putting greens which are native to the Middle East. God knows how much that defiance of natural circumstance must cost. And of course, in its modest way, our lemon tree isn't helping either. Every time I hear the gurgle of the irrigation pipe, I imagine the Dead Sea shrinking a little further. By the time we come to leave Israel, I'm told the tree will be too big to fit in our building's lift, so a crane will have to be hired to winch it over the edge of the balcony, thus probably raising the average price of the lemons again by quite a bit. Instead of selling it, I'm tempted to take it down to the shores of the Dead Sea and replant it there. Deprived of its artificial life support system, it might not thrive, but it will do it good to learn to fend for itself.
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Program Narrator
Kevin Connolly with plans for the world's most uneconomic lemon tree and bringing this edition to a close. I'm back with correspondents around the world on Thursday, Saturday of next week. Do join us. Goodbye.