← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Last Night in Gaza
00:28:06
Correspondents tell their stories: a week in Gaza, Paul Adams; on the night train from...
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Transcript14 lines
- [00:00]
A
This is a download from the BBC. It's from our own correspondent. We make one version of the program for the BBC World Service, but this is the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ad.
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B
Hello and welcome. Today, fear and suspicion in the People's Republic of Donetsk as Ukrainian forces close in. The American city, once a showcase for us optimism and ambition, is now the poorest in the country. How did it happen?
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Happen?
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B
Deep underground in a distant corner of Europe. The cellars where some of the world's VIPs keep their wine. And a glance into the world of the German super rich, where the motto is if you've got it, definitely don't flaunt it. Representatives from the us, several European countries and Qatar have been meeting in Paris this morning discussing ways of achieving a longer truce in Gaza. A 12 hour pause in hostilities is currently in effect there after an agreement between the Israeli government and Hamas. Earlier, the Israeli government rejected a seven day ceasefire proposed by the US Secretary of State John Kerry. The conflict has left nearly 900 Palestinians dead, as well as 37 Israeli soldiers and three Israeli civilians. Paul Adams is just back from a week of covering the violence in Gaza, a place he knows well.
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D
On my last night in Gaza, I lay awake late, listening to a constant rolling thunder in the distance. It rumbled and reverberated, and I began to think it was a rare summer storm. But the night sky was clear and the thunder was not natural. Somewhere out there in the dark, another part of the Gaza Strip was being pounded. It was, I realized, the sound of the next day's news playing out in Shejia or Beit Hanung or somewhere new. But I wouldn't be around to find out or deal with the next day's news. I was getting out the following morning. A bus from the improbably named Sweetie Tours picked up a posse of weary, flak jacketed journalists from our beachfront hotels and drove us out through the dusty streets of Gaza City. As we passed by, Gazans looked up at us with mild curiosity and, I suspect, a measure of disdain. After all, we descend on the Gaza Strip with almost feral intensity whenever there's fighting, but the rest of the time we leave it to fester, turned off by a conflict that seems so endless and cyclical. The Gaza of 2014 doesn't look so very different from the place I first visited 34 years ago. The same crowded, impoverished streets disintegrating slowly in the humid Mediterranean heat. The same filth, the same dust and the same sense of claustrophobia back Then I remember meeting refugees who had vivid memories of their flight in 1948 from what is now Israel. If I asked them where they were from, they'd rattle off the names of places that either didn't exist anymore or had long been renamed and repopulated by Israelis. But that generation has gone. When I ask people now where they're from, they look at me as if I'm stupid. And from Gaza, of course, generations have experienced nothing but occupation, embargo, blockade, war, and death. It's had a slow, brutalizing effect. Perhaps that's why some of them are seized by such a furious desire to tunnel out and seek revenge. For Gaza is a giant prison surrounded by a wall, watchtowers, and the most sophisticated military in the Middle East. On one side, of course, lies the Mediterranean, inviting but for the knowledge that just out there, beyond the horizon, lie the gunboats that pound away day and night. In the air, there are drones, mosquitoes, the Palestinians call them, which buzz about like so many model aircraft, each incessant whine representing surveillance. And if you're a militant or just plain unlucky death. There was an airport once. I was there when it opened, an elegant little affair which gave the Palestinians some badly needed pride, a rare sense of connection with the outside world. But it lasted barely three years. The Second Intifada broke out, and Israel bulldozed the Runway early in 2002. Of course, it would be wrong to suggest that this prison, 66 years in the making, is full only of the innocent. There are men of violence here, men who will never, ever accept Israel's right to exist in the land they still regard as theirs. Men who will store weapons in mosques and schools and. And take great pride in launching almost entirely indiscriminate rockets from the midst of populated areas, hoping in the name of resistance to cause death and fear on the other side. During a week in Gaza, I caught occasional glimpses of them, weapons stuffed under their shirts, furtive in civilian clothes, moving with purpose through the ravaged streets of Shejair looking for a fight. But when so many of those dismembered and burned by Israeli rockets and shells are not the fighters, but women of old people, and especially children, then it's really, really hard not to conclude that the Palestinians are being collectively punished. Yes, there are Israeli warnings, leaflets from the sky, phone calls and text messages. But where are you supposed to go when Gaza is so small and Hamas is everywhere? On Wednesday, in the center of Gaza City, I saw a man's legs and a ribbon of guts dangling from a Block of teetering masonry. Hungry. Halfway up a tower block, struck by two Israeli rockets. In that building, a family of 10 had died. They'd fled from Shejair to avoid the fighting. Some of them had even fled twice. But the war simply followed them wherever they went. There was no escape. What are we supposed to do, Israelis ask? Just sit here and be rocketed? There's no doubt at all that in the absence of a political solution, Israel's military dilemma is acute. But these occasional wars always end in stalemate and and simply sow the seeds for the next round. As I stood by Israel's metal gate, waiting to be let out of Gaza, I watched two last Hamas rockets soaring skyward and heard the sound of tank fire in return.
- [06:13]
B
And That's Paul Adams. 40 Military Police Officers from the Netherlands have arrived in eastern Ukraine to help search for bodies from the Malaysian airliner apparently shot down there nine days ago. They are joining a team of Australian police hoping to travel to the crash site, which is in territory held by pro Russia rebels. The Australian Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, said it was in the interests of the entire international community that the area be secured. Gabriel Gatehouse has been talking to people at and around the crash site.
- [06:47]
E
I must admit I was relieved to see the first Ukrainian flags as we left Donetsk. Their gentle colours fluttered over the checkpoint, yellow and blue like the fields of sunflowers around here at this time of year under summer skies. The young soldier who did not demand in a burst of expletive laden Russian invective, to know what lying Western media house we were from, smiled and wished us a safe journey. Actually, would we mind giving a couple of his mates a lift? Vadim and Sergei had been mobilised into the war effort. The but their uniforms were a decade old and they had no boots. We dropped them at a nearby town, Krasnoarmeisk. The name means Red Army Ville. There they would have to kit themselves out from their own pocket. These are the men who are getting ready to fight the rebels in Donetsk, to dislodge them from their self proclaimed People's Republic. They didn't seem nearly hard or mean enough. The People's Republic is not a happy place at the moment. With every passing day, fear and suspicion seep deeper into the soul of the city. Ordinary residents keep whatever opinions they still have to themselves. The rebels don't. And a disagreement is likely to end in a beating or worse. Ukrainian forces are closing in. You can hear the not too distant crump and thud of government shells or rockets falling on the outskirts. Sometimes they land closer by. Donetsk has become a place of sudden, unexpected violence. On the night train from Kiev, I'd met an old acquaintance, another Vadim. While he'd been away, one of those shells had landed on his apartment block, which sits in the contested no man's land between the airport and the city. He was on his way back now to salvage what he could and then return to Kiev. Later, while trying to cross the lines, Vadim got shot. He's in hospital now, recuperating, but his leg may have to be amputated. The flag of the People's Republic of Donetsk is deep red, black and blue. You see it flying at checkpoints everywhere. One day I saw the same colors on the faces of several men lingering around a rebel base in the small town of Snezhnoye. It wasn't clear how they got their black eyes, but behind the bruises they looked as if the threat of sudden violence was might no longer surprise them. Snezhnoye is not far from the place where Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 came down. Some believe it's from here that the missile was fired. The wide fields of corn are strewn with the mundane accessories of long haul tedium, an airport novel, a laptop computer. What was the last thing its shattered screen displayed? A scene from a film. Two bottles of duty free scotch lay miraculously intact amid the spewed out contents of holiday cases. Seeing our interest in the various bits of mangled fuselage, two eager local children approached bearing unidentifiable bits of plane. Perhaps these could be useful to you, said the older of the two, Paulina, solicitously. I was scared when it came down, said the younger Lisa. I thought we were being bombed. Lisa couldn't be more than eight years old, but already she's learned to expect sudden danger from the sky. In rebel held Snezhnoye, there's a residential block that's been sliced down the middle as neatly as a layer cake. It happened before seven one morning, a few days before the plane crash. A government airstrike local people say reduced one half of the building to rubble, cleaving open bathrooms and living rooms as if to expose a final moment of banality at breakfast or ablutions. We're not the terrorists, say the people in these rebel controlled areas. Look, this is what Kiev does to us. Some locals have fantastic theories about what happened to flight MH17. It was packed with corpses, shot down to give the West a pretext to intervene. I've heard that story more than once. Many swear they heard the sound of A Ukrainian fighter jet in the sky just before the passenger plane came down. No one I've met will admit to seeing a powerful surface to air missile system trundling along these quiet country roads. But the truth is out there somewhere. Propped up against a tree outside a house in the village of Petropavlivka is a potentially crucial piece of evidence. It seems to be part of the left hand side of the cockpit. It's peppered with shrapnel marks and there is what looks like a point of impact at the bottom. 10 year old Vlad told me he found it in his garden. He put it out front in the hope that international investigators would come and take it away from for examination. A week later, it was still there.
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Gabriel Gatehouse the unfolding crisis in Ukraine is raising tension across Eastern Europe, not least in neighbouring Moldova. This is Europe's poorest country, which like Ukraine, was a part of the Soviet Union until 1990. Today, though, it's looking to the European Union to help it emerge from years of political instability, poverty and endemic corruption. But just as in Ukraine, this westward tilt infuriates Moscow. And the Putin government has taken action against one of Moldova's greatest economic assets, its wine industry. Stephen Sacher has been to see how this tug of war between east and west is fermenting trouble in the vineyards.
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Moldova feels like the corner of Europe which time forgot. Beyond the capital, Chisinau, the countryside has barely changed in a hundred years. Horses haul carts loaded with produce and people. Geese glare at outsiders. And while the horrors of an ugly conflict have focused world attention on neighbouring Ukraine, Moldova's rural population has more parochial concerns, like bringing in the harvest. I join Vasily Kulyev on his rusting Soviet era harvester as it wheezes and groans through a field of barley. Two other men, as well worn as the machine itself, are perched on top of the grain tank. Vasily tells me each member of the crew will get three pounds for working from dawn till dusk. I ask him where the young men are. Gone abroad, he says flatly. Moldova's economy is built on small farms, hard labour and low returns. Ever since the collapse of the USSR and Moldova's transformation from Soviet republic to independent nation. And it has been the poorest country in Europe. But there is one fruit of the Moldovan soil that holds out the prospect of something the grape. Remarkably, this neglected nation of fewer than 4 million souls has consistently been amongst the world's top 10 wine exporters. Moldova's wine producers prop up the national economy. At least they did. But in the past year, their sales have slumped, their mood has soured. And the reason lies not in the weather nor the soil, but in Moscow. Russians have long had a liking for Moldovan wine. From the Tsars to the Soviet commissars, Moscow treasured its claim on the country's vineyards. And nowhere is that more obvious than the Krykova Estate. The winery boasts thousands of hectares of beautifully tended vines. But the real splendor of Krykova lies underground. Half a century ago, the Soviet masters of Moldova built one of the world's greatest wine stores in a warren of old mining tunnels deep inside the limestone hills, 70 miles of subterranean chambers housing over a million bottles. Krikova's marketing director, Alexandru Alexeev, gives me a guided tour. He stops his golf buggy beside an alcove filled with dusty bottles. This, he says, is Hermann Goering's private collection, taken by the Red army from Berlin in 1945. I grab a bottle of the Moselle White, rub off the dust and hold it to the light. It's murky. Bits of cork appear to be floating in the liquid. Don't remove the dirt, Alexandru admonishes. Even the dust is valuable. How valuable? I ask. Well, each bottle is worth £15,000, he says, and there are 129 of them. But it's not Hermann Goering's wine that is on Alexandru's mind today. It's the collection belonging to a contemporary figure, a certain Vladimir Putin. Mr. Putin has his own cave in the Krykova tunnels. He's been here several times, Alexandru tells me he likes this place so much, he held his 50th birthday party here. Then his face darkens. Of course, things have changed a lot since then. Russia's love affair with Moldovan wine, fostered during the Soviet supremacy, has come to a bitter end. Mr. Putin has been infuriated by the Chisinau government's decision to cozy up to the eu. And as Moldovans know from events in neighbouring Ukraine, Moscow is inclined to exact retribution. To punish the Moldovans for shunning his plan for a Eurasian Union spanning the former Soviet empire, Mr. Putin ordered a ban on the importation of Moldovan wine. It's been like a cold shower on us, Alexandru tells me. We've lost 30% of our exports. But we have to learn from this. We need to find new markets in Europe, in the US and in China. We cannot rely on Russia. So now Moldova's pro European government is watching the horrors in Ukraine with a deep sense of foreboding. When Mr. Putin talks of restoring Russian greatness, of reasserting Moscow's legitimate interests, he he's sending a message to Chisinau as well as Kiev. As the winemakers of Krykova know, to their cost, Russia still has leverage in the lands it once ruled. The wine embargo was the opening salvo. It may not be where the hostilities end.
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Stephen Sacher and you can see the film he made in Moldova in Heart Talk that's on the BBC News Channel on Monday. It's the midterm election year in the United States and significantly, there's some good news on the economy. Unemployment's down, manufacturing's up, fuelled by low interest rates and plentiful supplies of cheap energy. The source of American prosperity has, of course, changed radically in recent years. Industry in the US is now leaner and meaner. There are fewer blue collar jobs, more technological innovation. The change has had a devastating effect on some of those traditional industrial cities which enjoyed a boom in the post war years. Places like Camden in New Jersey, America's poorest city, according to the 2012 census figures. Sophie Reid travelled there from her home in nearby Philadelphia.
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Camden, just across the Delaware river from the City of Brotherly Love, seems to have become an invisible city, its spartan skyline forgotten by an America that has long since jettisoned the bulk of its manufacturing past. From Penn's Landing in Philadelphia, you can join a smattering of day trippers on a ferryboat ride to the east. In New Jersey, you can pick out fragments of America's industrial history. Through the juddering clouds, the vessel cuts north towards the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, which connects Camden to Philadelphia, two cities in two states. Shafts of light peep through the steely blue suspension bridge, a towering monument to America's automobile age. Over to the east, Campbell's baseball field comes into sight, a legacy of Camden's most famous export, Campbell soup. And if you squint as the boat steers south beyond Camden waterfront, you will spy City hall and the RCA Victor clock tower carving into the sky. Remnants of shipbuilding are scattered across the riverbanks. The Delaware river first brought prosperity to Camden trade, and people flooded in on the early steamboat ferries. In 1835, the first train chuffed into town and with it came an industrial boom. A river city emerged that epitomised American optimism and ambition. If you boiled that confidence down into a single product, you might end up with a can of that gloopy, comforting, condensed Campbell's soup, the jolly little red and white soup tin became an American icon. Premiering at the 1900 Paris Exhibition and starring in Andy Warhol's Pop Art, Campbell's became the world's biggest food company, symbolizing a sprawling industrialization that encroached even onto our dinner tables. Camden was home too, to the world's biggest gramophone and record maker, RCA Victor. It produced early talkie films and America's first drive in movie theatre. The city's shipyards were the globe's most productive, pumping out vessels that would spread America's message of might. The revered American poet Walt Whitman lived in Camden and bequeathed the city its motto. In a dream, I saw a city invincible. Half a century after the Titans departed, Camden bears the ugly scars of industrialisation. Three quarters of the city's manufacturing jobs disappeared between 1950 and 1980. Squalor and rising racial tensions emerged in their place. Camden's white and middle class families fled to pursue America's post war dream of spacious suburbia and shopping malls. Whitman was prescient. It had all been a dream, a dream from which Camden sadly awoke on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Camden's historic district is eerily empty. Families visiting the waterfront aquarium take the last ferry home. Campbell's today is a sleekly fenced office compound just blocks from boarded up homes. No soup is made here anymore. Audrey Eubanks refuses to leave. Her family moved to camden in the 1940s, when her father was a chemist at RCA Victor. She remembers how vibrant it was downtown. There were 12 movie theaters, she says. Now we have none. The diminutive septuagenarian polices the parkside neighbourhood where she lives. Drugs and crime lurk even in these neat avenues with their carefully trimmed lawns. An unofficial sheriff, Eubanks stops and questions anyone who might be up to no good. She knows everyone around here, and people stop to chat to her. The police call her grandma, she tells me. After a lifetime spent in Camden, Eubanks remains hopeful. There are people here like myself who are fighting for Camden. It will get better, but it will take a long time. She adds matter of factly, I don't think I'll be here. This determined little lady echoes a tough city. Turning to the Delaware river again, you can see that Camden has spruced up its waterfront. But it will take more than ferryboats to transform this city. Perhaps Camden's best hope lies in its resilient people, those like Audrey Eubanks who stay and soldier on, not to preserve Whitman's long departed dream of a city invincible, but to carve out a new American future.
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Sophie Reid in New Jersey. Now, why exactly is it that German supermarket chains like Aldi and Lidl have been making substantial inroads into the British shoppers consciousness? Figures earlier this year suggested their sales were soaring, while those of High street regulars like Tesco and Sainsbury's were declining. The answer, partly at least, lies with the fact that it's cheaper shopping at Aldi and Lidl and Steve Evans in Berlin says penny pinching, thrift and indeed secrecy are themes which preoccupy many at the very top of German industry.
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Nobody could accuse the richest people in Germany of flaunting their wealth. Quite the opposite. With the death of Karl Albrecht, there was no announcement for nearly a week, and not until the small private funeral was over. He and his brother Theo had turned their mother's small grocery store in the Ruhr into Aldi, one of the world's biggest supermarket chains. But the habits and thoughts of this mega business mogul were unknown. For the obituaries, the German papers could only trace bland statements he'd made in 1953 and 1971. This was not a chatty public figure. He grew orchids, apparently, and played golf. But on his own private golf course, in the absence of a public presence, a legend grew around him. The brothers, ex employees said, would keep accounts using stubs of old pencils almost too short to hold. It is said that they once told architects designing a new store that they were using paper that was too thick. It was this frugality which set the Albrecht brothers on the road to super riches. After the war, they took over the grocery store and set up a company called Aldi. After Albrecht Discount, they pared the costs to the bone, Dispensing with advertising and relying on the reputation for low prices, they sold what sold quickly, only 300 items. Initially, even shelves were thought to be too extravagant. After all, shelves had to be stacked, and that meant stackers and that meant wages. Instead, the goods were deposited in the stores on the pallets on which they arrived. Even today, Aldi stores usually offer no more than 2,000 products, compared with the 45,000 products for other chains. Food tended to be in tins because fresh food costs money to store managers had no telephones. They were told to use the nearest pay phone. When Theo was kidnapped in 1971, Karl negotiated over some days, according to the German media, and then paid the ransom, which, legend has it, he tried to offset against tax. If Carl Albrecht was reclusive, the head of the rival little chain is positively invisible. There are only two photographs in existence of Dieter Schwartz and one of those is in black and white. He may be the 25th richest man on the planet, but nobody outside his closest circle knows anything about what he thinks or does. It's the same with the Kvant family, which owns BMW. The product may be a symbol of conspicuous consumption, but they are a symbol of inconspicuous taciturnity. Take the case of Susanna Clattening, the daughter of the industrialist Herbert Kvantz, who made BMW the luxury car Colossus it is today. She was left 12.5% of BMW and with her other business interests, she's the 44th richest person in the world, but a woman with a low profile when she started in business, learning at the bottom as an apprentice, she worked at a BMW factory under a false name. The man she married never knew her real identity until the romance was solid. The German way with money is to keep it quiet. It's partly because frugality is a virtue, a matter of morality, and not just of wise behavior. And maybe after the experience of Theo Albrecht, privacy means you're less likely to get kidnapped. It's not kind of place then to approve young millionaires roaring around in expensive cars. They may make the Porsches and the BMWs, but it's for others to rev them up and show off. The figures show that private wealth in Germany is more unevenly distributed than in any other country in the Eurozone. While the richest 1% have personal wealth just short of a million pounds, a quarter of adult Germans have no wealth or even owe money. Germany, then is more unequal than it looks, partly because the motto of the country might easily be if you've got it, definitely don't flaunt it.
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Stephen Evans there with valuable insight into how the super rich remain super rich. And that's it. I'll be back next Saturday morning with more correspondence stories. I hope you'll join us. Goodbye.