← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
June 9, 2011
00:28:15
Amid uproar in and around Syria, Kevin Connolly considers suggestions that there have...
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- [00:00]
Narrator
Hi there. You're about to hear from our own correspondent, a download from the BBC. We make editions of the programme for both the BBC World Service and Radio 4. And this is the latest Radio 4 broadcast.
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Kate Ady
As ever, it's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Programme Presenter
Are the authorities in Syria trying to manipulate the news to distract the world from the violence inside their country? A Central Asia correspondent on why she's no longer allowed to report in Kyrgyzstan. Also today, a walk through the Belgian village killed off by the spread of Antwerp's Docklands. And a falling out in South Korea as our reporter grapples with a greener lifestyle. The continuing violence in Syria, and particularly the deaths of more than 100 members of the security forces at the town of Jizr al Shugur, have dominated the news this week. The headlines diverted attention from an incident which happened on the armistice line separating Syria and Israel. On the Golan Heights, there were deaths and injuries when Israeli troops opened fire on protesters attempting to cross into Israeli occupied territory. At the town of Majd al Shams, Palestinians were angered by Israel's use of lethal force against unarmed protesters. Many Israelis see the failed incursion, the second in a matter of weeks, as an attempt by its enemies to create a new tactic, the threat of Palestinians massing on Israel's borders, demanding the right of return. Kevin Connolly was in Majdal Shams as events unfolded.
- [01:31]
Narrator
When the early sun burns away the last of the misty night in Majd al Shams, it leaves a landscape that looks a little like model railway scenery. All evenly shaped pale hillsides and symmetrical thickets of darker green trees and patches of grey rock. When the noise of gunfire dies away in such a place, the silence that follows has an air of unreality. It feels too still and too deep. It must have felt this way in 1967, when the guns fell silent at the end of the Six Day War, leaving Israel in possession of the rich farmland and spectacular mountains of the Golan Heights. It felt like it again this week as peace returned after a grim and extraordinary few hours in which Israeli soldiers fired live ammunition at protesters trying to breach the border fence. Actually, properly speaking, the line that divides the two hilltops, one under Israeli control and one in Syria, is a line of disengagement, not a border, since there is no peace deal to make it permanent. We had been watching as the protesters shuffled and slipped down the Syrian hillside to the deep trench filled with razor wire which now marks the frontier. Within perhaps an hour, the protesters found themselves pinned down by live gunfire directed down the slope at them. By Israeli soldiers. The only cover available to the demonstrators was a mound of earth displaced by Israeli army engineers over the last few days as they reinforced their line between the hills. There had been warnings in Arabic and warning shots, but from the moment the demonstrators began to move down the hillside, the unfolding events of the afternoon seemed at once horribly inevitable and at the same time horrible, horribly unreal. Something in the futility of the protests, the way the demonstrators were stuck at the razor wire, perhaps conjured echoes of the vulnerability and pathos of soldiers fighting in the First World War. Except, of course, that the groups we watched carried no firearms. Over the course of perhaps six hours, they risked their lives to reach the fence, scrambling or somersaulting over the top of the earth mound into the relative safety of the ditch below. Every time someone made it, a shot rang out from the Israeli soldiers above. There was no possible gain beyond the symbolic gesture of trying to breach the fence and the opportunity to expose Israel's readiness to use deadly force. And, not surprisingly, no one made it anyway. They seemed like small returns for such a deadly risk. Casualties were manhandled awkwardly on stretchers, back up the steep hillside and onto ambulances, then disappeared into the chaotic uncertainties of a crumbling police state. There is no way of knowing how many people were killed. Syria says 22 or 23. But such is the low priority attached to truth telling there that those figures are meaningless. Equally meaningless is the Israeli assertion that the Syrians are clearly exaggerating. They may well be, but the Israelis have no idea if the live ammunition they claim to have been firing at the feet and legs of protesters left people bleeding to death as they waited for treatment in the Middle East. Once you have chosen between the irreconcilable narratives on offer, everything confirms the narrative you have chosen, and nothing confounds it. In the eyes of its enemies, Israel will have confirmed itself as a brutal, ruthless, militaristic, and expansionist state because it has no internationally recognized legal right to the Golan Heights. And the Israel of Masd Al Shams hardly seems like the Jewish David ranged against the collective Goliath of of the Arab world. But the idea that such incursions might become a regular tool for their enemies evokes the Israeli national nightmare of Palestinians massing on their borders, demanding the right of return. And Israel sees the protesters as extremists or followers of extremists. In that context, it calculates that anything short of an immediate resort to overwhelming strength would seem like weakness. But there is another kind of weakness in the way Israelis sometimes struggle to understand their enemies. They tend to assert, without offering proof to me at least, that protesters at such events are paid according to a kind of rate card, $50 if you turn up for a demonstration, $900 if you're shot and injured, $10,000 if you're killed. Someone who's prepared to risk their life for $50 is going to make a pretty desperate long term enemy. And above all, Israel sees Syrian government manipulation in all this, a cynical attempt by the blood soaked regime of Bashar Al Assad to start people in the Arab world talking about the tension on its borders rather than the terror within them. If that's true, then it's darkly ironic that the grim events at Majd al Shams were overshadowed within a day by a massacre of Syrian government troops at Jizr al Shugor. The emptiest reflection of all, perhaps, and not an uncommon one in these parts, is that a day of violence which for many families will have changed everything for the wider world, has changed nothing at all.
- [06:40]
Programme Presenter
Kevin Connolly In June of last year, serious rioting broke out in the Central Asian city of Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan. Within days, nearly 500 people had been killed, thousands more injured and tens of thousands of others had fled their homes. An independent inquiry into the events had concluded that Kyrgyz mobs and members of the security forces may have committed crimes against humanity against ethnic Uzbeks. The BBC's correspondent in the region is Reyhan Dimitri. She provided coverage of those events in Osh and tells us what's happened since.
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Reyhan Dimitri
It's been exactly a year since I witnessed one of the biggest tragedies in Kyrgyzstan's modern history. It was a defining moment. People now refer to Kyrgyzstan before and Kyrgyzstan after the so called osh events of June 2010. Inter ethnic fighting between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz living in the south of the country claimed nearly 500 lives. Thousands were injured, neighborhoods were burned down and hundreds of thousands more were displaced. Life in Osh, a historic oasis town situated on the legendary Silk Route, famed for its bustling trade, fertile climate, its roses and its melons will probably never be the same again. For four days between June 10th and 14th, the city saw savage fighting between the two communities. Ordinary men became murderers, rapists and torturers. It was hard to believe that this sort of medieval cruelty could take place in the 21st century. Throughout the worst of the fighting, I was based at one of the border crossings between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. On the outskirts of Osh. Cars, minivans and trucks loaded with frightened people kept arriving. I heard the same account over and over again. Uniformed men in armored personnel carriers had cleared the way for mobs to enter barricaded Uzbek neighborhoods. Homes had been attacked and set on fire. Up to 100,000 people, mostly women, children and the elderly, sought safety in neighboring Uzbekistan. I saw the bodies of children crushed to death in the rush to escape. Fathers, brothers, husbands and sons stayed behind to protect their homes. I was born in Tashkent, the capital of neighbouring Uzbekistan. Many people later asked me how it felt being an ethnic Uzbek witnessing such a tragedy. My answer was that I had to focus on my job and simply tell the world what I was seeing and hearing. But as an ethnic Uzbek, it was impossible for me to report directly from the Kyrgyz side of the conflict. It was simply too dangerous at the time to get to those parts of Osh wracked by violence. I had little idea then how much trouble that was going to cause me. A week later, physically and emotionally exhausted, I left the conflict zone for Kyrgyzstan's capital, Bishkek. But to my surprise and disappointment, I didn't find the support I had hoped for from journalist colleagues there. The events in Osh, I think, had divided us along ethnic lines. It seemed to me that as far as my Kyrgyz colleagues were concerned, I was Uzbek first and BBC correspondents second. And that was only the beginning. The Kyrgyz press was loaded with reports about how the country had lost a so called information war to the international media. Western news organizations were accused of biased coverage for focusing their reports on the sufferings of Uzbeks, with little attention given to victims who were Kyrgyzstein. Last October, I was summoned to the Kyrgyz Foreign Ministry and told that I could no longer work there as a journalist. My press card was cancelled and no further explanation given. Since then, I have been unable to return to Kyrgyzstan to report on alleged continuing human rights abuses there. International rights groups have repeatedly claimed that the majority of those killed during the ethnic clashes were Uzbek and that most of the properties destroyed were Uzbek owned. Despite this, it was ethnic Uzbeks who ended up apparently being disproportionately targeted by the prosecutors. 27 life sentences have been handed down by judges, all to ethnic Uzbeks. An international inquiry commissioned by the Kyrgyz president to investigate what happened in Osh published its findings last month. The report makes grim reading. It details the coordinated and systematic nature of attacks against Uzbek neighborhoods. Most importantly, it alleges that state security forces may have been complicit in the violence. The report concluded that the nature of the attacks on Uzbek neighborhoods could amount to crimes against humanity. It's understandable, perhaps, that the Kyrgyz government didn't like the report its own president had commissioned. It claimed the investigation was one sided. The country's parliament went even further and recently voted to ban the head of the independent inquiry, Finnish politician Kimo Kiljunen, from re entering the country. I'm not the only one, it seems, who is no longer welcome in Kyrgyzstan,
- [11:48]
Programme Presenter
and that's Reyhan Dimitri. The European Commission is expected to take action against Ireland after a report suggested that an environmental ban on cutting turf on some of the country's protected bogs is being ignored. For the Irish, that could mean fines totalling tens of millions of euros. Tracy Logan says the bans proved hugely controversial. There's resentment in the countryside at what's seen as foreign interference and also distrust between scientists who study the bogs and local people who harvest them for fuel.
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Tracy Logan
It took two Irishmen to pull me out of Woodfield Bog in County Galway. Tugging on my right arm was Luke Ming Flanagan, a newly elected independent member of the Irish Parliament, or Doyle. Pulling on my left was the press officer of the Turf Cutters and Contractors association, an organisation made militant by an EU ban limiting rights to harvest peat for Irish home fires. It's easy to get stuck in the mire when covering turf wars. Like many rural families, Luke Ming Flanagans have turf cutting or turbury rights on a bog that's among Europe's most threatened habitats. Bogs may seem like vast beige wastelands with just the occasional rock for interest, but up close they're a squelching forest at your feet, home to all manner of tiny plant life. They support crawling, hopping and flying creatures of all kinds, making them a priority for conservation as a source of fuel for free. Bog peat is black gold to rural communities, but the environmental cost of extracting it is huge. A brick shaped sod of turf burns well for an hour, but it will take the bog a hundred years to replace it. Yet in these recessionary times, with fuel prices rising, the turf cutting ban has sent chills across rural Ireland. In January, 4,000 turf cutters gathered to protest against the enforcement of the bog ban. Meeting just weeks before the general election, they were a powerful political force which swept the then mayor of the town of Roscommon, Lord Luke Ming Flanagan, into the Doyle. Best known for his campaign to legalise cannabis, Flanagan is now the turf cutter's most potent advocate. Inspired by an ancestor A century ago, the republican priest Father Michael o'. Flanagan. Then with Ireland still under British rule, officials tried to give preferential turf cutting rights to Irishmen serving in the British army. Father o' Flanagan stepped down from his pulpit and onto the bog with a turf spade, successfully asserting an Irishman's right to cut the turf. A century later, his great nephew Ming now seeks to achieve something similar. But this time, the opponent is EU officialdom. Flanagan cites bureaucratic heavy handedness, lack of consultation with turf cutters and bad science. Whatever scientists say or the law, Flanagan is cutting turf this year. Humans are part of the environment too, he says. Others are doing the same. As officials stand by avoiding confrontation, turf cutters protest their demands are reasonable, but the use of machines has increased their impact on the bog. Where once teams of men cut peat with hand tools or slains donkeys, carrying away the turf in baskets on their backs, now giant mechanical claws do the cutting. As I watched, it took just seconds for a claw to reach forward and scrape away a 3 meter high slice of woodfield bog, dumping its load of thousand year old peat into a giant hopper. Driving slowly away on its caterpillar tracks, the hopper pooped out 30 metre long strings of perfectly parallel sods for drying on this bog. Turf cutting remains legal, and as we left, a couple of English tourists arrived to cut some turf for themselves. Stepping out of the bog, trying to avoid sinking, we stepped carefully on the firm ground of the hopper tracks as small brown frogs leapt aside, a surprising sign of life on such scarred terrain. The poet Seamus Heaney describes bogs as black butter melting and opening underfoot. It's why I kept sinking into them. A day earlier, it had happened in Clarabog, while I was interviewing the wetland ecologist Jim Ryan, a senior government adviser. Walking on bogs is like walking on water, he explained. They're less solid than milk. Turf cutters may think the little patch they cut does no harm, but the water channels they dig to prepare peat for cutting act like bursting a balloon here, he said. In the government's Living Laboratory of bog science, a 60 metre stretch of turf cut last year damaged a patch 10 times bigger. As we walked across the sunken, barren terrain of Kut Bog, the rushing sound of artificial streams confirmed the landscape is changing. The streams were a disturbing sign of the bog's shifting hydrology. They reduced the bog's ability to buffer rural flooding. And they may also be diverting water away from nearby protected woodland. Climbing up onto virgin bog, we marvelled at the mosses, heathers, grasses and tiny red and white plants at our feet, including little white Andromeda, the county flower of Offaly. Now, if that were 10 times the size that it is, jim said, people would be jumping up and down with excitement. You have to look at the fine scale on the bog to see its beauty.
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Programme Presenter
Tracy Logan now what causes a once thriving community to die for its people to disappear, its houses and factories to crumble to ruins, and for weeds to spring up through the cracked tarmac of formerly busy roads? Natural disasters may be to blame. Volcanoes, earthquakes and of course, tidal waves can cause devastation on an epic scale. But often the causes are more prosaic economic reasons. The atrophying of industry, the drying up of jobs these are what usually bring a place to its knees. Tom Blas has been walking the deserted streets of one of the latest to go quiet. It's in northern Belgium.
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Tom Blas
If you like tranquil spots, Doel, on the Belgian bank of the river Scheldt may be the perfect village for you. There is almost no traffic noise. Children are neither seen nor heard. There are no weekend strimmers. In fact, aside from the cawing of the jackdaws and the automated peeling of the village bell tower, there is little to disturb the near deathly silence at all. Not a decade ago, Doole's population was a thousand or so, a thriving community of farmers and workers in the nearby docks and chemical works. It boasted some fine houses and gardens, decent restaurants, and was pretty enough to attract passing tourists. With a handful of exceptions, those inhabitants are gone, their former homes in varying states of decay. Nardule has the appearance of a place reeling from the shock of some unspecified apocalyptic event such as baffles archaeologists centuries on, it possesses an additional disconcerting characteristic. Thanks to the artistic efforts of youths and activists in the surrounding region, almost every other square metre of the village is decorated with bizarre graffiti satirically lamenting its demise. One in particular had me chuckling. It featured the Olympic rings expertly painted, and underneath the legend DOOL 2018, the stern gaze of a crow checked my nervous tittering in its tracks. Dool's transformation from prosperous village to ghost town has nothing to do with the nuclear power station further along the river. Not, nor even with the river itself, which flows as tidily as the power station billows. The culprit for the demise of Dool is our ceaseless appetite for commodities and goods, the consequences of which were all too visible as I drove towards the village. I left the pretty heart of old Antwerp, travelled through a tunnel beneath the Scheldt and on into the hinterland of building materials, warehouses, derricks and earthmovers that betray the inexorable growth of Antwerp's docks. They are the great moor stomach and entrepot of Europe, from whence many tens of thousands of tons of shipping containers are redistributed across the continent by rail, truck and barge. Dool is a necessary victim of our collective demand for larger, deeper docks and all their attendant logistic accoutrements. At least that's the argument that's been put forward by the Port Authority for the past decade or so and and echoed by the construction companies and the local mayor. The remaining villagers see things differently. It was with some trepidation that I knocked on the door of one of the few remaining houses that looked habitable. I had been told that renegades and other ill defined ne' er do wells had taken advantage of some of the empty properties and were hiding out on the cheap. And to be frank, I would scarcely blame anyone for being reluctant to greet strangers in a place like this. But Cecile did. Despite her basset hound, Zezka, cautioning loudly against doing so, welcoming me into her cozy, cluttered home, she was only too happy to regale me with her woes. Some years ago, she said, the local government began to spread the word that Dool had been earmarked for dock development and offer the villagers a deal. Sell up voluntarily on good terms or face forcible appropriation at some future date. Almost without exception, they sold up. It was painful for her to remember how this village had once been and a childhood swimming in the Scheldt and playing in the nearby woods and fields. But despite the emptiness and the spooky atmosphere, she could not contemplate living anywhere else in the world. Later, I called upon Marina and her husband. I was drawn to the many placards outside their house, plainly spelling out their opposition to the dock development. Unlike Cecile, Marina is comparatively new to Doel, but her concern is to prevent history from repeating itself where her own home village used to be. Like Doole, once a pretty bustling dorp, there is now a deep water dock which she says has yet to see a single ship. It is a lie that they need to build a dock here, she told me. They already have facilities which are completely unused, but they can't bear to admit that they're wrong and they're determined to destroy Doel. But they're not going to persuade us to sell, and they haven't yet found a court which will force us to leave. Doel, she says, is a special and Unique place. And the best thing of all is that it is so very quiet.
- [22:55]
Programme Presenter
That's Tom Blass. Over the past 50 years, South Korea's created a trillion dollar economy. That in turn used to mean a lot of pollution. Now, though, the government is trying to switch the country to what it calls a green growth strategy. It's pushing businesses, transport sectors and private individuals to embrace recycling and to reduce their carbon footprints. For the householder, this means there are quite complex procedures to follow. And Lucy Williamson, who has just begun a two year posting as our correspondent there, admits they are causing her a little difficulty.
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Kate Ady
Mr. Boo sits in a shed at the entrance to my building. He's not really a caretaker, nor really a security guard. In fact, I've never got around to asking him exactly what his job entails. To be honest, I'm a little nervous of him. Mr. Boo isn't renowned for his social skills, but whatever his exact job title, much of his time seems to revolve around monitoring the apartment block recycling bins. Recycling is something Mr. Boo takes very seriously. From the little window of his shed, he gets a decent view of everyone visiting the big rubber bins outside the front gate. There are four of them. Each is for a different kind of rubbish that I can just about get my head around. But there's more. Each apartment block has a different way of grouping the recycled rubbish and each kind of rubbish has a different kind of rubbish bag that they all appear to be various shades of orange and white and they're clearly labelled in Korean script. I'm not going to feel too bad that my Korean vocabulary hasn't yet embraced the niceties of waste management. But it's no comfort when the consequences of getting it wrong can be so severe. A previous tenant in the apartment, a BBC colleague, told me how Mr. Boo had assiduously gone through all the CCTV footage during his brief stay here and and then clipped out all the frames showing how he and his family had done it wrong. Two things were learnt from this exercise. One, that there is apparently a correct and an incorrect way to place your bag into its bin. And two, that Mr. Boo is not a man to let things go. But maybe it's just me. As a Londoner, I'm simply not used to people caring quite so much about recycling. The last time I lived in the uk, my apartment didn't even have a recycling system. Those tenants with a guilty conscience would occasionally trek down to the bottle bank and paper bank up the road, but there weren't many. But 20 years ago, attitudes weren't that different. Here in Korea, its population and size is about the same as England's. But Korea, now a G20 nation, got rich very fast indeed and ended up with half its population living in and around the capital, spending their new income on more and more stuff and throwing it away. More than 90% of it was being dumped in landfill. The new green regime came in almost overnight. Recycled rubbish was now collected free, but families had to buy special bags for their landfill waste, the idea being that people would want to spend as little as possible on the special bags and so recycle more. It seems to have worked. The amount of waste recycled increased from 15 to almost 50%. Now the green movement seems to have a life of its own. Government policy papers heave with environmentally friendly initiatives. There's Green Growth, Green Start, the Green Life Movement. There are financial incentives for shoppers to buy green products, green mileage programs for their manufacturers, a carbon point scheme run by the government, and support for a new concept called eco driving. It's even been adopted as Korea's national vision for for the next 60 years. Recycling is now so ingrained that women can be seen outside the local supermarkets tearing the cardboard from their cereal packets before setting off home. And tenants of the apartment blocks here often get together at a set time each week to help each other sort out and recycle their rubbish. Mothers and school children, the bossy aunties and sometimes the odd husband roped in for effect. Perhaps that's what I need in my apartment. Even amongst Koreans, Mr. Boo seems especially committed to the recycling program. I've had instructions in how the system works from three separate people now, and I'm still not entirely sure how it works. I know it's important to put the rubbish into the right bags and to put it into the bins, upright and standing neatly next to its neighbour. I've tried, but I still don't seem to have impressed Mr. Boo. In an effort to get off on the right foot, I've made sure to address him as Mr. Boo. And every time I pass his post, I thought it was working. He seemed to respond, sometimes even with a smile. But a few days ago, he arrived at the door to my apartment angry and upset. It turns out he doesn't like being called Mr. After all. Not respectful enough, he says. Think of something else. It could be a long two years for us both.
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Programme Presenter
Lucy Williamson there, struggling to be green enough in Seoul and bringing this edition to a close. I'll be back here on Saturday morning with a fresh batch of dispatches from a around the world. Do join us. Goodbye.