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From Our Own Correspondent
Jerusalem On Edge
00:27:45
Foreign correspondents. Today, Kevin Connolly on tension in Jerusalem:- a reminder, he...
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Chris Haslam
Thank you for downloading this podcast we make from our own correspondent for the
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Kate Adie
BBC World Service as well. But this is the edition broadcast on Radio 4 and it's introduced by Kate Ady. Hello. Today, trouble in the city which has beguiled hearts and inflamed passions for longer than any other remembrance weekend in the Flanders fields near Ypres. But our local traders now put in cash before compassion. Along the mighty Volga river we find the Russian Republic where people have the reddest hair in the world. And among a weekend of memories in Berlin. A love story without a happy ending. These have been days of mounting tension in Jerusalem, much of it connected with the Temple Mount or Haram Al Sharif, a site sacred to Muslims, Jews and Christians alike. Jordan recalled its ambassador to Israel earlier in the week after police used grenades, tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse a group of stone throwing Palestine Palestinians who'd barricaded themselves inside the site. Muslim worshippers have been angered by a campaign by far right Jewish nationalists who want to be allowed to pray there. Kevin Connolly says there's nowhere in the Middle east or elsewhere quite as sensitive as this spot in the heart of Jerusalem.
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Kevin Connolly
They built the streets of Jerusalem's Old City high and kept the streets narrow. So to walk in through the ancient gates in the midday sun is is to slide into a pool of cool, perpetual twilight. The stone tiles on the sharply sloping streets have been worn to a slippery smoothness by the footsteps of the faithful and it's a well trodden path the pilgrims follow. St Helena, mother of Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, passed this way around the year 320. She found a piece of the True Cross here too. And the Church of the Holy Sepulchre marks the site to this day as the holiest in all of Christendom. Mind you, it would have been a plucky retainer who suggested to the emperor's mother that 300 years on from the crucifixion, that piece of old wood she found was probably just an old piece of wood. There are souvenir stalls everywhere, but here, even they feel like part of an ancient tradition. In the 13th century, Louis IX of France made a fortune for Christ's original crown of thorns. It's still somewhere in Paris, I think. Nowhere has beguiled hearts or inflamed passions for as long as Jerusalem. The Romans, the Crusaders and the Turks, the British and the Babylonians all passed this way. Nebuchadnezzar and Hadrian each destroyed a Jewish temple in their time and Jerusalem has endured 23 separate sieges. It is sacred to Muslims, Jews and Christians alike. But the key struggle for primacy focuses not on Jerusalem in general, but but on one place in particular. It's a walled compound within the walls of the Old City, known to Muslims as Haram al Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, and to Jews as Temple Mount. Muslims believe it was on these grounds that Muhammad began his journey into heaven. Jews believe that beneath them lie the ruins of those two ancient temples, central to their faith and their identity. Here, it is said, Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son on the instructions of God. Here stood the temple from which Christ is said to have chased the money changers, although the modern tourist will find their successors still open for business not far away. Here, Muhammad tethered his horse before he made that last journey. It is as though the faiths which shaped our world radiated out from this single spot and then in turn drew the faithful back from all over the world to wander, to worship and to fight for control. A strict status quo governs rights of access to this holiest of places. Muslims alone have the right to worship. Jews may visit but may not pray. Any hint of change could instantly provoke widespread disorder. Here's how powerful that status quo remains. Jordan controlled east Jerusalem until 1967 and so controlled access to the Western Wall, insensitively but memorably known to British troops of an earlier occupation as the Wailing Wall. So when Israel captured the old City in 1967, it put the most important place of prayer in Judaism back in Jewish hands. But Israel also captured Haram al Sharif, the Temple Mount. There's a photograph that shows young paratroops flying the Israeli flag nearby. Their commanders quickly and smartly ordered them to take it down and then returned control of the sanctuary, which contains the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, to the control of the Islamic religious authorities. Even in the afterglow of a series of stunning military victories that defined the modern Middle East, Israel was anxious to avoid doing anything here that might provoke a wider holy war. After all, a clumsily managed row over the site under British rule in the 1920s and had triggered violent rioting and widespread loss of life. But some Jews now talk again of revising the status quo. Why, they ask, should they not pray there, since the place is sacred to them? And since Israel controls access to the Old City, Jerusalem was already feeling edgy, a legacy of the summer fighting in Gaza and continuing Jewish settlement in Arab areas of the east of the city. The Israeli government says the status quo will remain, but you sense it wouldn't take much to make things worse. A reminder to those of us who live in Jerusalem that the very things that make the place one of the glories of our shared civilization make it difficult and dangerous, too.
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Kate Adie
Kevin Connolly there. Tomorrow's Remembrance Sunday. In many British churches and this year, the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, the congregations could be bigger than ever. The centenary has also seen a surge of interest in the memorial sites and battlefields of the Western Front. In Ypres, the Belgian city devastated in the years of conflict, tourist numbers have gone up by more than 100% in the last 12 months. There have been queues and traffic jams at key sites like the Tynecot Cemetery and the Menin Gate. The visitors, of course, bring money to the area. But Chris Haslam wonders if putting a poppy on everything from seaside rock to shopping bags means some now put profit before compassion.
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Chris Haslam
At sunrise the other day, I walked through the Menin Gate and out of Ypres, heading north across Flanders Fields to the village of Langemarck. Windblown paper poppies were strewn across the Menenstraat and there was a streak of red in the eastern sky. I was on the move because Ypres had disturbed my sleep. Exactly a hundred years before, the first battle for this smug little city had given the world a preview of how the First World War would be fought. With the front line now stretching from the Belgian coast to the Swiss frontier, the ebb and flow of mobile combat had been replaced by the stagnant morass of trench warfare. By 1919, Ypres was just rats and rubble. But even as the corpses were still being recovered from the battlefields, the tourists were arriving. The first were the relatives of the dead, brought over free of charge by the St Barnabas Society. But they were soon ousted by commercial tours. Thomas Cook offered two itineraries. The basic package priced at nine and a half guineas, and the luxury experience, priced at 35 guineas. 399 pounds and 1,475 pounds at today's prices. Alarm at the exploitation of sacrifice for profit quickly spread. The journalist Harry Greenwald described the tourist as morbid seekers after sensation. And Rudyard Kipling was was moved to remind visitors to respect the spirit that lies on that land of desolation and to walk through it with reverence. Now, with the centenary of the Great War upon us, the next four years will be a boom time for tourism. An Ypres, which peddles remembrance where once it sold linen, is cashing in on streets teeming with old soldiers and school groups. You can buy T shirts proclaiming I'm a battlefield Relic. You can buy teddy bears in tin hats and, perhaps most cynically, Passchendaele lager. When opening the bottle, says the label, please hold a minute of silence to commemorate those who fell on the battlefield. Well, this is what God has given us, growls the grandmother, selling poppies made from Belgian chocolate. We make the best of it. Steve Douglas, who runs the British Grenadier Bookshop, is worried about the commercialism but argues that the merchants of Ypres are merely fulfilling a needle. People need hotels, they need restaurants, and they want to buy souvenirs, he says. And as long as the memory of the men is not being exploited, I'm. He pauses. I'm kind of OK with that. We have a right to make a living, says local student Nicky Vloran. The past has cast a shadow that won't be lifted in our lifetimes, and their names live if forevermore. Remember. Keeping that promise is a full time job for the Commonwealth Wargraves Commission, which maintains 196 cemeteries around Ypres. The wet weather of West Verlanderen has been as tough on the Portland stone as it was on the troops, and the commission is busily replacing 22,000 headstones a year. My route March takes me past a dozen of these lonely cemeteries. They lie under a low mist that shrouds the fields like mustard gas, and while all seems quiet on the Western Front, I'm uneasy. It's nothing to do with what the local farmers call the iron harvest. Around a quarter of the 1 billion shells fired in Flanders were duds, and every year around 150 tons of unexploded ordnance emerge from the sticky mud. Note my disquiet is caused by something less solid a brooding sense of malevolence oozing from the earth, as though the violence has a half life. I'm no believer in ghosts, but the old lady I meet walking her dachshund most certainly is. Her name is Beatrice, and her dog, curiously, is called Robert. As we amble down the muddy track, she tells me about mysterious lights seen flickering in no man's land, of half heard screams in the night, and of corners of fields where generations of Robert's ancestors have refused to go. We part at a crossroads and I continue counting the graves. By the time I reach the cement house cemetery, the total is a staggering 5,645 deaths for just 5,000 metres of line. But in Langemarck, there's an even greater horror. Here, in an area the size of a tennis court lie the bodies of 24,917 German troops. Their names are inscribed on weatherproof blocks of black basalt. And beside one, under a pebble, there's a note in a polythene bag that couldn't keep out the Flanders reign. The letter is smudged and unsigned, but still legible. Es tut mir leid ab ichverstehr nicht wo vuge stauben. It says. I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you died for. Few of us do. But we can be sure of one thing it wasn't for chocolate poppies.
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Kate Adie
Chris Haslam in Ypres. Now they are the sort of questioners you really don't want to get in the pub quiz. How many of the 22 Russian republics can you name? And even worse, how many of them can you spell? The newest one's Crimea, which controversially and suddenly became a Russian republic this year. It's an accession not recognized by much of the international community, which still regards it as part of Ukraine. Some of the republics want out of Russia and have separatist movements fighting their cause. But there are others content to be a part of Moscow's empire. As Mark Stratton's been finding in his travels along the Vol river, the Udmers
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Mark Stratton
are said to possess the reddest hair in the world. The Tatars and Bashkirs descend from the Golden Horde. The Maori worship animist spirits amid their sacred forest groves. The connection between these different ethnicities is they're all represented within their own republics, inside the Russian Federation. With Russia seemingly pursuing an aggressively nationalistic agenda, I wonder what life was like for the ethnic minorities in the republics. So I travelled 500 miles east of Moscow to the middle Volga lowlands, where six of these republics cluster together. They have their own parliaments to deal with local issues, but their governors are appointed by Russia's president to ensure their subordinate to Moscow in national matters. None of the republics I'd visit Chuvashia, Muriel, Tatastan, Udmertia, Mordovia and Bashkortostan are exactly new to Russian integration. Back in the 1550s, when tsarist Russia was at war with the marauding Tatars, Ivan the Terrible constructed a line of defensive forts along the Volga through the lands of these minority peoples. Pragmatically, they sought protection within the Russian Empire and indeed backed the winning horse because Ivan lived up to his terrible sobriquet and forcibly subjugated the Tatars into Imperial Russia. Joining Russia was a matter of preservation of our culture rather than colonisation, insisted Tamara Vorobayeva. My Chuvashian guide in the republic's capital, Cheboksary. Yet while a majority of citizens of Chuvashia claim Chuvashian descent, Vorobayeva conceded that centuries of mixing with Russians and Tatars make it difficult to define how a typical Chuvashian looks. Nonetheless, she says Chuvashing culture has undergone a revival since the Soviet Union's demise. Chuvash is now taught alongside Russian inside schools, and street signs are written in both languages. We're very happy inside Russia and have never felt discriminated against, she said. Some extreme elements want a deeper cultural revival and have proposed Chuvash as the Republic's sole official language. But this would force our ethnic Russians out and that would be an economic disaster. Neighbouring Mari El Republic is just 60 miles away amid thick pine forests. The Mari migrated here in the 6th century from the Urals, and their language approximate to Finnish. Mariel has a majority of ethnic Russians, and once again, I was told it's impossible to define a typical Mori look with any certainty. Because of centuries of intermarriage. I had read reports claiming Maori culture was under attack, but local English tutor Svetlana Maimina insisted all citizens of Mariel lived harmoniously together. My heritage is Jewish, she told me. We don't have a synagogue here, but I've never experienced a day of anti Semitism in my life. Over centuries, indigenous peoples across these republics have undergone a conversion away from traditional folk religions to Orthodox Christianity. Yet in Yoshka Ola, at Mariel's National Museum, Nastya Agazina said the Maori still practice folk worship. Every rural village has a shaman. We go to the sacred birch groves to feast and offer sacrifices to the spirits in the trees. I wondered if the Russian Orthodox Church frowned upon this. No, she insisted. We hold both beliefs. In the morning, people might attend church and in the afternoon visit the sacred forests. Perhaps the strongest cultural identity I encountered was that of the Muslim Tatars, who are just over half the population of Tatastan. The Tatars arrived here in the 13th century as part of the Mongol Golden Horde, before their unprofitable conflict with Ivan the Terrible three centuries later. Nowadays, Tatastan's capital, Kazan, is a modern, progressive city, rich from oil wealth. Ivan's 16th century hilltop Kremlin still dominates Kazan, and university lecturer Rezida Mohammad Sanova showed me around it. Since Communism ended, two dazzlingly ornate places of worship have been rebuilt there. The Kos Sharif Mosque and the Cathedral of annunciation. Barely 100 metres apart, they were reconstructed simultaneously by our governor to show even handedness dealing with different faiths, said Muhammad. All religious persuasions live peacefully alongside each other, and we have no culture of radicalism. I'm a Muslim woman, but not required to wear hijab. I'd later encounter the Mordvins of Mordovia, the oil rich Bashkirs of Bashkortostan and the Erdmurz, all cultures heavily assimilated into the Russian way of life. And yes, some odmurts really do boast a shock of bright red here. Ethnic and religious harmony haven't always reigned in Russia's myriad republics. Think of Chechnya. But in the lands of the middle Volga, it seems their diverse cultural casserole has simmered away for centuries without ever boiling over.
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Kate Adie
Mark Stratton India within a few years will have the largest university age population anywhere in the world. And education is a big deal in this country, with an enormous youth population. But are the universities there coping? The signs are not good. The higher education system there was designed for the elite, and in this system, top tier institutions capture the lion's share of resources. That means provincial state institutions are chronically underfunded. The private providers, meanwhile, eager to enter the educational fray, are hamstrung by red tape. It's a headache for government, but imagine how students feel. As Craig Jeffrey, who's been teaching in Uttar Pradesh, tells us, some are resort to desperate measures.
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Craig Jeffrey
Students in India are famously keen to exercise their rights, but recently there's been an interesting twist. They're talking about their right to cheat in university exams. It's our democratic right, a thin, addled looking man named Pratab Singh once said to me as he stood, chai in hand, outside his university in Uttar Pradesh. Cheating is our birthright, he added. Corruption in the university exam system is common in this part of India. The rich can bribe their way to examination success. There's even a whole subset of the youth population who are brokers between desperate students and avaricious administrators. Then there's another class of student altogether who are so well known locally, so renowned for their political links, invigilators dare not touch them. I've heard that these local thugs sometimes leave daggers on their desks in the exam hall. It's a sign to leave me alone or else. So if those with money or political influence can cheat, why shouldn't poor students? Students make other arguments, too. When I was working in western Uttar Pradesh, Pratap ushered me into the bowels of a smoky canteen in the middle of his campus. Kicking a stray dog off a chair, he took out a packet of country cigarettes. India's university system is in crisis, he began, lighting up and blowing the smoke towards the ceiling. Cheating happens at every level. Students bribe to get admission and good results. Research students get professors to write their dissertations and the professors cheat too, publishing articles in bogus journals. I sympathized with Pratap. On one occasion the registrar at a college in Uttar Pradesh sent master's students dissertations to be graded by students at another college. This type of thing is common, but in this case school pupils ended up marking master's level work. I honestly don't know whether to laugh or cry, pratap said, hunched over the Formica table in the canteen and shooing away the flies. The equipment in our science labs should be ripped out and thrown down a well, he said. It's like universities were in the 1950s in Britain. A while back I brought up the topic with Pinky Singh in the women's hostel of a prominent college in Uttar Pradesh. We were sitting in a space that was half study area and half courtyard for urban livestock. Pinky tried to talk above the loud noise of a buffalo in heat. If you really want to know the truth, she said, there's no point in studying properly. You just need to buy one of the cheat books sold in the bazaar and learn the example answers. In my first year doing history I tried to study properly, but my seniors just told me, buy the cheap books. Some of the new private universities are no better. Pinky told me about one that was established recently and which called itself Zap University. Students paid large sums to enroll online and then the university just disappeared from the Internet. It had no physical location and no trace could be found on the web. Pinky told me it just went zap. As I think back to these conversations, I conjure up in my mind an image of the universities I've seen in Uttar Pradesh. Etched in my memory are mouldering books, leaky hostels and bare lawns. And then I remember the signs of opulence that surround some of this decay. The expensive SUVs and three storied houses of the principals, the fancy shopping malls and yes, the few universities in the region that are genuinely offering world class education and which, with their flashy signboards and glass fronts, mock the ordinary colleges. What's the solution? When pro cheating rallies were held in Uttar Pradesh in the early 1990s, the chief minister gave in to demands and repealed an anti copying act. He actually allowed students to cheat. Prime Minister Modi's approach is different. He's trying to change things. There's a new regulation system for higher education. Funding for universities increased by about a fifth in the most recent five year plan from central government. But such reforms are like a cumin seed in a camel's mouth. And anyway, delivering education is the job of Indian states, not the central government. And states like Uttar Pradesh are not investing properly in provincial universities. And so Pratab, Pinky and many others like them are marooned by modernity, clinging to the sinking ship of an outdated university education. The right to cheat Agitation is no oddity. It is an ironic comment on India today.
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Kate Adie
And that's Craig Jeffrey. The fall of the Berlin Wall was one of the 20th century's most iconic moments, history in the making and thanks to television. We were all there. We saw the sledgehammers being swung, the suddenly uncertain East German border guards, the tide of ecstatic humanity streaming through the breached concrete. There were, of course, East Germans determined to escape before the Wall came down. For some, it was the last journey they ever took, but others did manage to get away. Jenny Hill's been to meet two of them.
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Jenny Hill
Autumn sunsets in Berlin can be colourful, violent affairs. They flare pink and orange behind the clustered apartment blocks and accentuate in str silhouette the roofs, gables and chimneys of the district where I live. The rooftops of Prenzlauerberg have recently captured my imagination. Partly because there was a time, so I'm told, when they were so interconnected that you could walk right across the district without once having to set foot on a pavement. But also because of a story I've just been told. A love story which begins behind the barbed wire and concrete of the Berlin Wall. Let me tell you about Marion and Jens. They were in their early 20s and they were in love in what was then communist East Berlin. They just moved in together. Jens was a biology student. Marian studied art. She loved to sit and sketch the view from the roof of their apartment. I imagine them, faces bright with enthusiasm, sitting up there among the chimney stacks, looking across their city at sunset, dreaming together of the future. But it was 1987. For them, opportunities were limited. Jens wanted to travel. He wanted to see the wildlife of other countries. Already his curious nature had brought him to the attention of the Stasi, East Germany's notorious secret police. Up there on the rooftops of Prinslauerberg. They talked about leaving, but how West Germany and the freedoms it offered should have been just a 10 minute walk away. But the Berlin Wall, a deadly barrier, was standing in the way. Everyone was throwing glances across the Wall. Jens tells Me, but I didn't want to get shot dead trying to cross it. I thought to myself, what's the thing no one would expect from someone wanting to go from east to West Berlin? I thought, I'll go the other way, all the way around the planet. So Jens hatched an extraordinary escape plan and he wanted Marion to come with him. To get to the west. He decided they would travel east to Russia, through Mongolia and onto the Chinese capital, Beijing, where they could claim citizenship at the West German embassy. Jens bought an old Cyrillic script typewriter at a flea market and forged the documents they needed to get to Russia. And so began an epic 6,000 mile journey. Jens showed me the photographs. Marion smiling with the brightly dressed children of nomads. Jens bearded and grinning next to a camel. The couple posing in front of a giant stone Buddha, carrying their bulging backpacks. They took trains, hitched lifts, crossed a river in a canoe and slept in a tent in the mountains. It was, Marion tells me, overwhelming, fantastic. An adventure. It was also dangerous. Marion and Jens were staying at a monastery in Mongolia when guards arrived to arrest them. It turns out the monks, who'd seemed so welcoming and urged them to stay longer, had turned them in. As the intelligence officers checked their documents, the students were left unguarded for a moment. They ran and hid for a night in the forest outside. Eventually, they crossed the Chinese border by train. They were so close now to the Beijing Embassy and the possibility of a new life together in West Germany. But Marion just wasn't ready to leave her family, her friends, her life in Prinzlauerberg behind for good. She wanted to go home to East Germany. There was the thought that if I went to the west, people close to me would run into difficulties, she says. I didn't want to lose the place where my roots were and I wouldn't have been able to go back ever. Jens, though, couldn't bear to return to the restrictions of the communist regime. The escape, the freedom they'd found along the way, was a taste, he tells me, of the joy of discovery, the. The smartness of youth, knowing you've found the gaps that none of the old men in government had thought of. With each step I found that life was open. I didn't know what I'd do tomorrow, but I knew I could decide. So they separated in China. It was over. Jens made it to the embassy and on to West Germany. Marion went home alone to East Berlin. Two years later, the wall came down. 25 years later, Marion and Jens still live in Germany. She's now an artist. He's a biologist. I talk to them separately. They rarely see one another. But ask them about that summer, that grand adventure, as I did, and for a moment you see a light bright as a Prinz Lauerberg sunset flare in their eyes as they remember what they describe as their forbidden journey.
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Kate Adie
Jenny Hill with just one of the stories being told in Berlin this weekend as they remember the day the Wall came down. And don't forget, you can hear lots more from our correspondence whenever you like by downloading our podcast. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.