← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
July 27, 2011
00:28:07
The Arab-Israeli conflict seems to have been sidelined in this year of revolutions.
Loading summary
Transcript14 lines
- [00:00]
A
This is from our own correspondent. We make an edition for the BBC World Service as well. But this is a download of the latest Radio 4 programme and here to introduce it as ever, Kate Ady.
- [00:11]
B
Today, a year of revolutions in the Middle east and North Africa leaves Israel with a new set of challenges. Turn right for Libya. We get a briefing from the NATO aircrew who've flown 20,000 sorties over Tripoli. There are celebrations on the cobbled streets of old Tallinn as Estonians mark 20 years of independence. And is it Alzheimer's? Parkinson's? Brain Haemorrhage? Our man in California checks his emails to find out. The extraordinary developments in Libya and neighbouring countries this year haven't all been welcomed by the authorities in Israel. Security along the country's southern border is being reassessed. The gunman who attacked an Israeli bus near the resort town of Eilat earlier this month are thought to have crossed into Israel from Egypt. There are other concerns at home after a series of unprecedented demonstrations against the country's high cost of living. And Jeremy Bowen says the government's also looking ahead to next month's United Nations General Assembly.
- [01:11]
A
My passports say it all. Like most foreign correspondents in the Middle East, I have two one for Israel, the other for Arab countries. That's because some Arab states won't let you in if you have an Israeli visa. My passport with the Israeli stamp shows that for almost six years, until last December, I was in Jerusalem about once a month. Then nothing until a quick visit last week. This year the Arab Israeli conflict has been sidelined. As for the other passport, since January, when the revolutions began, I've almost filled a new one jumbo size with Arab stamps. The overthrow of Kermal Gaddafi in Libya makes the essential point about this remarkable year even clearer. The Arab world is in a time of seismic and irreversible change. The 60% or so of Arabs who are under 30 want a different way to live. We've had an extraordinary nine months and the drama isn't over yet. So it was strange to be back in Jerusalem, surrounded once again by the hatreds of that never seemed to change. Israeli police with clubs and automatic weapons were still on guard at the gates to the walled old city. Plenty of Israelis believe that Palestinians have no interest in peace. Palestinians feel the same about Israelis and were still simmering with anger and resentment about the expansion of Jewish settlements and about the way that the Israelis sometimes stripped Palestinians born in the city of residents rights if they spend time abroad. There is nothing new in any of that. For so many years, the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians has dominated the Middle East. This year, the two sides have been as immersed as ever in their struggle. But most of the time, the world hasn't been watching. The main event has been elsewhere. But that doesn't mean it's all over. In fact, and I'm shuddering a little as I write these words, as I. As I've written them so often before, the signs aren't good. Unless you follow the Middle east closely, you can be forgiven this week for not paying much attention to the bloodshed in and around Gaza. Another serious and deadly flare up is happening between Israel and Hamas, Gaza's radical Palestinian rulers. What makes this one even more significant than usual is that it's coming during this time of change. The latest run was ignited by the deaths of eight Israelis killed by gunmen who crossed the border from Egypt. Israel's Defense Minister, Ehud Barak believes that since the revolution, Cairo has been losing control of the Sinai Desert, making it an attractive place for jihadists and Palestinian radicals. And there might be political change coming to the conflict, too. Hamas's rivals for Palestinian leadership, the group around President Mahmoud Abbas, are preparing to take their case for independence to the United nations in New York next month. Israel is against and in the Security Council. The Americans are expected to use their veto. But Palestinians want the General assembly, where there are no vetoes, to recognize not just their independence. That's clearly a symbolic matter at the moment, but also the route of their future borders. That is not symbolic, because the General assembly is likely to support the Palestinian view of how much land they should get and not the Israeli one. The Palestinians, who are so far resisting pressure from the Americans to drop the plan, believe they can change the game by getting the world more directly behind them. And they think the reaction so far of Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shows that they've got him worried. His government is suffering from an overdose of new challenges this year. Over the summer, a new protest movement has sprouted in Israel, demanding a fairer society declined, disgusted by the power of a handful of billionaire tycoons in a country that used to regard itself as egalitarian, it has adopted some of the techniques of Arab protesters setting up tented camps starting in one of Tel Aviv's richest boulevards. They've even come up with Hebrew versions of some of the Arabic chants for change that they've been watching on tv. The old Middle east suited the Israelis, but it's disappearing. A top Israeli journalist told me a few years ago that every morning, the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem offered a prayer for the health of President Mubarak. What he meant was that Israel believed the best way to manage the threats it saw in the old Middle east was to make sure that nothing changed. But this year, change is everywhere, and that's Jeremy Bowen.
- [05:57]
B
One of the questions being asked as the Libyan rebels stormed Tripoli was exactly how much has NATO contributed to their success? A communique from the NATO HQ in Naples says that in the five months of its Libyan operation, its aircraft have flown more than 20,000 sorties. Yesterday, British jets bombed a bunker in the northern town of Sirte. Jonathan Marcus is just back from the Italian air base where many of the NATO planes have been based on.
- [06:23]
C
The mess tent at the Gioia del Colle air base, located on the heel of southern Italy, gives a whole new meaning to the idea of a hot breakfast. It's some 37 degrees outside, too hot to touch the metal skins of the RAF Typhoon and Tornado jets deployed here. But inside the tent where the chef and his small catering team are serving a traditional English breakfast, the temperature sometimes reaches a very non traditional 60 degrees. This is at the unbearable end of hot. No wonder then, that bottles of water are stacked several ranks deep. And the best place to take breakfast is outside on an impromptu patio between the freight containers that today have become the essential furniture of military bases around the world. Joya del Colle, which translates as Joy of the Hills, is. Is a dry, dusty, pastel shaded kind of place. There's been a military airfield here since the First World War. The conflict has brought strong British connections. It was captured by the 8th army in October 1943 and subsequently used by the US Air Force. The control towers look like the standard World War II buildings that you still see dotted around old bomber stations in Lincolnshire or East Yorkshire. But it's the more recent British connection that has brought the RAF here. For one senior officer I was talking to, this was not his first deployment to Joya. He'd been here once for air operations over Bosnia, then again for Kosovo and now for Libya. The difference, he joked, well, for the first two, you take off and turn left. For Libya, you turn right. Sitting in the cockpit of a Typhoon is a remarkable experience. It's cramped, but the controls are very clear. One display shows an outline of the aircraft with calming blue panels both ahead and behind the pilot and in each wing. Less reassuring when you're told these are the full fuel tanks. As I sat there, a Tornado taxied out from under its improvised sunshade and rolled off along the Runway. Some minutes later, a Typhoon roared off too. Flying faster, it will catch up with its companion off the Libyan coast. But how much difference has this operation, in which the RAF is only a part, actually made? For all the turmoil across the Middle East, Colonel Gaddafi's regime in Libya looks set to be the first to be swept away in its entirety by a popular revolution. But in any analysis, NATO air power has been decisive. Nobody at Joya thought that air power alone could dislodge the Gaddafi regime. Indeed, everyone I spoke to held closely to the NATO script. Their mission was solely to protect civilians. But as the campaign wore on, this appeared increasingly to be a convenient diplomatic fiction. Nonetheless, air power looks to have delivered on the one hand, over weeks and months, it contributed to the steady erosion of the Qaddafi regime's military capabilities. It is also evident that air operations were ramped up in the days immediately preceding the rebels advance on Tripoli. The choice of targets, often headquarters of various kinds, clearly intended to knock what was left of the regime off balance. Technology has moved on dramatically from Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq. The ability to fuse imagery and data from a variety of systems. Airborne radar, unmanned aircraft and the targeting pods under the fast jets together providing an unparallel view of what was going on on the ground. New weapon systems, highly accurate, often with smaller warheads designed to restrict damage to the desired amount, all contributed to the success of the mission. Nonetheless, this is still all about dropping high explosives. Things can go wrong. Innocent people can still be killed or injured, and a full account of the operations, successes and failures will only come over time. One senior officer told me that this has been a unique operation at the boundaries of what modern air power can achieve. But air power is as much about people as it is technology. The hundreds needed not just to keep the fast jets in the air, but also the command and control aircraft with their powerful radars and the aerial tankers without which nothing would have been possible. There are the ground crews, the logistics teams, and the intelligence analysts. And then, of course, there are the cooks and the bottle washers too, working away, uncomplaining in those extraordinary temperatures. A hot breakfast, sir? Did I say they also did a rather good continental option as well?
- [11:10]
B
Jonathan Marcus Estonians have been celebrating 20 years of independence. The Republic of Estonia was officially restored on August 20, 1990, the day after the abortive coup in Moscow, which eventually led to the breakup of the ussr. Protests against Soviet rule in Estonia had gathered pace three years earlier, hundreds of thousands assembling in the center of the capital, Tallinn, every night for a week to sing songs of protest. Today, Tallinn is a vibrant and much changed place. It's one of Europe's cities of culture. Sarah Sheridan says its history hasn't been forgotten and its people are still singing.
- [11:49]
D
Estonia is one of only three former Soviet states now considered democratic. Since Soviet rule ended in 1991, the country has been resolutely turning its back on Russian influence and forming solid partnerships with nearby Scandinavian democracies. Establishing, for example, a partnership with Finland intended to leave it completely independent of Russian fuel supply. It's a city in transition. Skyscrapers, like huge shards of glass, are interspersed with traditional low rise wooden buildings, paint peeling and windows boarded up, so neglected you can see sky through the roof. This is one legacy of the Soviet era. Property was nationalized, but as the Russians withdrew, the heirs of original owners were not always apparent. As a result, substantial portions of prime Talon real estate simply don't have an owner. On the cobblestones of the medieval old town, the contrasts continue. Affluent Estonians join the array of tourists on the balmy midsummer streets, while others, mostly old women in threadbare clothes, sell pretty hand tied bunches of wild flowers for only a euro. Tourists fire a substantial portion of the Estonian economy. British stag weekends and alco travellers from Finland and Sweden come for the friendly atmosphere and the cheap booze. More surprisingly, there's a sizeable number of Russians, a hangover from the 18th century when the Tsar built a summer home in Tallinn and it became Russia's second largest port. After independence, the Estonians passed legislation that citizens must speak Estonian to merit a passport, disenfranchising resident Russians and striking a hefty blow for independence. Most of these disenfranchised Russians have lived in Estonia all their lives and have families here. There have been campaigns to try to change the terms of citizenship to include them. The language requirement, however, remains a point of national pride. In my hotel, for example, the multilingual porter insists on speaking to Russian visitors in English. The message is foreign here now. Estonians are good at peaceful civil resistance. Towards the end of Soviet rule, thousands came together for midnight choral gatherings to sing themselves free in Estonian, of course. Choirs here under a single conductor have been known to number as many as 34,000. Voices singing together became a vital way of demonstrating national identity. It's everywhere. As I pass through the old town, a crocodile of seven year olds on a school trip sing in unison as they walk beyond the cobbled streets. A run down area past the central railway station is scheduled for redevelopment. These are the Last months of the Balti Jam Russian flea market. A jumbled array of produce, from fresh fruit and vegetables to spare bike parts are crammed together. I buy an empty 1958 Soviet biscuit tin. We beat those Soviets, the stallholder says. Past the flea market is what's called the cultural kilometre, or 2.2 km to be exact. Talon is redeveloping its seashore and has big plans for the area around the ferry terminal. During the Cold War era, this part of the shoreline was off limits to Estonians. They couldn't sail here or even walk along the beach, not even when the city was hosting the Moscow Olympic sailing events. Such restrictions in a city that was once a Hanseatic League trading giant must have been painful indeed. Today there is a flotilla of little yachts on the water, reclaiming their rights. Now there are plans to develop a cultural centre here and government buildings along the waterfront. They say this is a key part of the lasting legacy of the City of Culture. But work has scarcely started. Back in the old town, the black bow tied audience is emerging from a Rachmaninoff concert. It's busy and the best word for the atmosphere is hearty. As one of the stag weekenders stumbles drunk in the street, the connoisseurs on the steps break into applause. That's what I like about Talon. The mixture, the unexpected, ramshackle, hearty acceptance of it and the belief that in the end, abandoned buildings will find their owners, the seafront will bustle with life, and this country, slowly sorting itself out after a long period of foreign rule of one kind or another, will be free to speak its language and sing its song.
- [16:45]
B
Sarah Sheridan Idealists amongst us may dream of a perfect world of peace and harmony, where no one's poor, where the climate's always pleasant. A place without disease or calamity, perhaps without politics as well. For centuries, writers and religious people have dreamed of finding such a spot. Correspondents, often confronted with the misery of disaster and wars, have also been known to dream of such a hideaway. Kieran Cook's just been off in search of it. High in the mountains of western China,
- [17:16]
E
I wake feeling dizzy. High up on the Tibetan plateau, altitude sickness is a common occurrence. There's complete silence, punctuated finally by the gentle thonk thonk of a bamboo bell round the neck of a passing yak. Then the most homely of sounds echoes down the valley. A cuckoo greets the rising sun. The women in their vivid pink headdresses are already working in the fields below. Smoke curls into the rarefied Air from kitchen fires in the large Tibetan style houses in the nearby village. Welcome to Shangri La, an area in mountainous Yunnan province in western China. In the 1930s, the British author James Hilton first talked about Shangri La in his book Lost Horizon. It conjures up an idyllic land of learned lamas or Tibetan holy men, where time stands still, where people never grow old, where there are no conflicts or wars, where crops and fruit grow in abundance. Films were made. An ideal was formed. The stories are rattling good yarn, but a myth. Hilton, who never visited China, wrote his book in North London. The place he describes seems to be somewhere in the Himalayas. It's thought some of the material in his book might have been inspired by the writings of an American botanist living in Yunnan and present day. Shangri La is a myth as well, says the man with skin like tan leather in the yak meat restaurant in the town of the same name. He's a former university lecturer from eastern China, exiled to the area in the 1970s during the ravages of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. Eyes twinkle through the smoke of foul smelling cigarettes. I was sent to Shangri La as punishment. A laugh turns into a gravelly smoker's cough. The Communists used to dismiss the whole idea of Shangri La as Western romantic nonsense. But then they saw they could make lots of money out of tourism. Several places in China and in Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan vied with each other to claim the title of Shangri La. The rivalry became intense until, so the story goes, clever local officials in what was then a small town called Zhongdian flew in journalists from all over China, treating them royally, obligingly. The journalists then went away and wrote about the beauties of Shangri La. And myth very quickly became reality. My university friend and I walk down the cobbled streets in Shangri La's old town, all low wooden buildings and arched roofs. It's not old at all, he says as we passed the quick photo taking and Tibetan clothes renting shop. It's been created to look ancient, but most of it's been built for the tourists. What about the giant Buddhist prayer wheel on the hill? The world's biggest? It's only been there a few years and there are hardly any monks up there. And unlike the place of myth, Shangri La has its tensions and resentments. The local population is made up mainly of Tibetans and those who Beijing refers to as minority peoples. In recent years, there's been a large influx of Han Chinese from the East. There's a substantial military base outside the town, and imposing buildings constructed in the style of Tibetan lamasteries, with tens of small windows on every side, house the Communist Party headquarters and the security services. We share a bottle of Yunnan wine amid the plastic flowers and gaudy furnishings in the lobby of the Paradise Hotel. Centuries ago, French Jesuit missionaries planted vines in the area. The taste is pleasant and light. The locals don't like the way the newcomers control the tourism industry and the economy, says the university man. But on the other hand, there's far more money about, and people can build their houses and send their children to school. And away from the bustle of the town and its souvenir shops, there's a haunting beauty about the region. Here on the roof of the world, the nights are sharp and clear. The stars seem closer. In this isolated corner of the most populated country on earth, the stillness is deafening. I plod up a steep hill to a Tibetan temple, careful to take long, slow breaths in the oxygen starved air. Prayer flags are draped between trees. There's a sacred mound of stones. A lama is in the midst of some highly energetic prayers, prostrating himself and then jumping up time after time. Very good for the liver, he says in immaculate English before collapsing into a corner to play a game on his mobile phone. On the way out, I take a picture of an ornate, multicoloured prayer wheel. It has a beguiling look, familiar and yet of another world later leaving Shangri La and returning to a more mundane existence. I look at the photo again. Myth becomes reality. What I thought was a prayer wheel is in fact a dartboard.
- [22:35]
B
Kieran Cook A major growth industry in California's Silicon Valley is the highly controversial area of genetic testing. From a simple saliva sample, the companies involved claim to be able to work out your susceptibility to inherited diseases. You don't need a prescription. In fact, your GP doesn't have to be involved at all. The results can be sent straight to your email. And the tests are getting cheaper all the time. David Willis in California says that while some there believe the results can prove unnecessarily worrying, others argue that they help to promote more proactive health care.
- [23:14]
F
I'm dying. I'm convinced of it. We all are, to an extent. Of course. From the moment we enter this world, we're counting down to our exit.
- [23:22]
D
But.
- [23:23]
F
But I'm dying faster than you are. The evidence is simply overwhelming. Take last week, for example. On Tuesday, I woke up with a headache. The second in two months, in fact. The doctor told me to take an aspirin. But what if it's a brain haemorrhage, a few minutes on the Internet was all it took to convince me my head could be playing host to a tumor the size of a football. And if I'm haemorrhaging, that could explain the problems I've been having with my eyesight. The small print in the newspaper is now so small it's started to look like bacteria. At the rate I'm going, I'll be lucky to make it to retirement without a guide dog and a white stick. Assuming I'm not a vegetable by then. Of course, I'll admit there are times I feel fine. But even if I'm bouncing around like the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland, I'm not only convinced my body is plotting against me, but that some exotic new strain of the E. Coli virus is hard at work making a home for itself in my bloodstream and having lulled me into a false sense of security. In due course it will cause my vital organs to shut down and my innards to implode, and before I know it, I'll be communicating with a roll of the eyes and taking my meals through a plastic tube. Such fears are irrational, I know that. Yet in the last few years alone I've had CAT scans and colonoscopies, MRIs and ECGs, chest x rays and sleep studies, turbine as well as tonsillectomies, and paid so many visits to my GP that he once joked about INV me to the office party. I've sought the advice of neurologists, ophthalmologists, dermatologists, rheumatologists, podiatrists, pulmonary surgeons, ear, nose and throat experts, acupuncturists, chiropractors, hypnotists and holistic healers. And on top of that, I've even been to Lourdes and every specialist consultation involved that nerve wracking moment when they shut the door, plucked the test results from the file and then uttered those five terrifying words. There's nothing wrong with you. Because the one thing a hypochondriac can't bear to hear is that he's fit and well. And if there's one thing more irritating than that, it's when your bodily fluids, instead of underperforming, start to steal the show, eliciting gasps of admiration for everything from the color of the urine to the consistency of the stools. Which is what happened to me. Yet instead of proving a source of comfort, it made me even more convinced the medics had missed something. So it came as a considerable relief to Hear about a company that could take a small sample of your saliva and use it to assess your risk of getting any one of nearly a hundred different diseases. With almost feverish excitement, I gathered my saliva sample and a cheque for £60, sent them off to the lab and started started pacing up and down. Then a few days ago, up popped an email with the results of the wide variety of diseases they test for. It's clearly the scary stuff that people are most drawn to. The results for the big two, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, were locked away behind several pages of explanation and qualification and even required their own password. I felt my heart beat a little faster as I clicked on the first one, Parkinson's. My results were normal. My chances of getting it pretty much average. Then I clicked the other box and felt the blood drain from my face. The gene most closely associated with Alzheimer's disease is known as apoe. There are three varieties of the APOE gene, each carrying a different level of risk. And I have the one that carries the greatest risk of all. Scanning the notes in a state of low grade panic, I discovered that things could have been worse. It seems those luckless enough to inherit that type of gene from both their mother and their father stand an even greater chance of getting the disease than I do. There are those who question whether these sorts of tests should be available to the neurotic and the highly strung. People like me, in other words. But I found the results allayed more concerns than they generated. It's by no means certain that I'll get Alzheimer's, of course, but I can at least keep tabs on my blood pressure and cholesterol, two factors which are known to have a bearing on the disease. And of course, I have the perfect response the next time I come across one of those smug specialists, to borrow a phrase from the gravestone of the comedian Spike Milligan, I told you I
- [27:54]
B
was ill. And with that from David Willis in California, we've reached the end of another edition. I'll be back next Saturday morning with more from our in correspondence. Some feeling rather poorly, others no doubt in the rudest of health. Good bye.