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From Our Own Correspondent
Love Commandos
00:28:05
Fergal Keane meets exiled Syrians in Istanbul and finds little agreement among them...
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Hello, this is the. From our own correspondent office at Bush House in London.
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You can check out what we're up to by signing up to our Twitter
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feed, but here's a download of our
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latest programme on BBC Radio 4, introduced as ever by Kate Ady.
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Today, the cardinals are plotting. The popes talking of sadness and betrayal as scandal rocks the Vatican. The Indian couples who are turning their backs on tradition and calling on the love commandos. We're in the lawless borderlands of eastern Congo, where politics, history and nature have created a deadly brew. And on the beach, sunning ourselves in New York's most interesting ethnic enclave. The government in Syria is coming under increased international pressure after the UN Human Rights Council approved an investigation yesterday into the mass killing of civilians at Hula Last week, President Francois Hollande of France said the crisis could now only be solved by the departure of the Syrian leader, Bashar Al Assad. Assad. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon believed the escalating violence showed there was an urgent need for bolder action. While Foreign Secretary William Hague, who was in Istanbul yesterday talking to members of the Syrian opposition, warned the country was on the edge of catastrophe. The Turkish port is currently home to hundreds of people who fled the violence in Syria. Fergal Keen's been to hear their stories.
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From the Galata side of the bridge, they looked like pieces of shimmering silver slowly ascending towards the heavens. Line by line, the fishermen pull their catch onto the upper deck of the bridge at the Golden Horn, the inlet that divides the city of Istanbul. Watching this on a glorious late spring morning, I thought of WB Yeats evocation of this city when it was Byzantium, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. That is no country for old men, he wrote. The young in one another's arms, birds in the trees, those dying generations at their song, the salmon falls, the mackerel, crowded seas. Although he never visited, Yeats thought of ancient Byzantium as the ultimate incarnation of the city, a place where the aesthetic, the spiritual and the commonplace blended in perfection. It's also long been a city of exiles, of migrants from all corners of old empires who brought their art and literature, cuisine and architecture, of the rural poor who flocked here in more recent times, and lately the political exiles from the turmoil of Syria. It was their story that had brought me here, a narrative of plotting, disunity and feuding that seemed to fit with so much of this great city's history. The leaders of Syria's opposition have gravitated towards Istanbul because Turkey is once again a symbol of. Of immense power in the region and a sworn enemy of President Assad. The Syrian National Congress is far from being a government in waiting. Its members seem to agree on little beyond their loathing of the Assad regime. But they all find the old imperial city a congenial place in which to quarrel. Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul. The city's name has changed with the rise and fall of empires. Walk the streets and you follow in the footsteps of Latins, Greeks, Arabs, Armenians, Turks and many more. All have left their imprint in the human architecture of this city. At Bayezit Square, you'll pass the spot where the Emperor Alexius V, blinded by his enemies, was thrown from the top of the column of Theodosius after the Crusaders sacked the city in 1204. Walking in the streets near the great Topkapi palace of the Ottomans, one can picture the fierce Sultan Murad IV cleaving the heads from the shoulders of those who displeased him. It was said men with fat necks were in particular danger. Yet Murad was also capable of sympathy for artists. He granted a stipend to Nephi of Erzeroum, one of the greatest of the Ottoman poets, who wrote once that the sins of drunkards would be forgiven by the wise. It was a risky line. Murad had banned consumption of alcohol on pain of death. Or perhaps Nephi was sending him a subtle message, for it was whispered that the Sultan himself was addicted to alcohol. From this city, the Ottomans administered a vast empire. It stretched from Central Europe to the far borders of the Middle East. It included the territory that is now Syria. The refugees who make it from Syria to Istanbul are the lucky ones. Its cramped rooms are still a far better prospect than the dusty refugee camps of the borderlands, melancholy with the memory of lost worlds, its early mornings haunted by the booming of ships, foghorns and the calls to prayer of the mosques along the Bosphorus. Istanbul, as Yates and Nephi and numerous others realized, is a city to stir the soul. It should not have been a surprise then, to encounter among the Syrian exiles a child reciting verse. Her name was noor. She was 10 years old. Five months ago, she'd been living with her parents and her younger sister and brother in Homs, in the suburb of Baba Armor. Her beautiful child's eyes hadn't yet learned the art of concealment. They spoke of wariness and anger. Her mother told how the family had fled Baba Amer when the bombardment could no longer be endured. But the war followed them to Istanbul. Her seven year old son heard fireworks recently after a football game. And he screamed, they're coming to kill us. The girl, Noor, expressed her anguish through poetry. Her mother and the other women in the room urged her to recite for us. She declaimed in the traditional Arab style, I tried to go to school, but my classmates are all dead. My teacher cannot teach us as the road is blocked with snipers. As she reached the end of the poem, I noticed that one of the women in the group was crying in a small room in Istanbul. She had been touched by the poetry
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of loss, and that's fergal keen. A rebellion by mutinous soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo seems to have turned a provincial conflict into an affair. Earlier this week, a leaked UN document accused neighbouring Rwanda of supporting the rebels, though the government in Kigali has categorically denied any involvement. Gabriel Gatehouse has just returned from the beautiful but lawless region around Lake Kivu in eastern Congo, where politics, history and nature have conspired to create instability and danger.
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There's a saying in these parts, and it goes like where logic ends, Congo begins. It certainly feels like that as you wind your way through the picture postcard lush green hills of Rwanda towards the border. Here the roads are smooth and well maintained. You drive past tidy little villages made up of immaculate red brick houses with scrupulously tended front gardens. The roadside is patrolled by armed officers clad in high visibility jackets. Rwanda might be the Switzerland of Africa. On the last Saturday of every month, the whole country gets together for something called Umuganda, a mass communal tidying up exercise complete with inspections of people's homes. Nearly two decades after it was consumed in a spasm of genocidal hatred, Rwanda projects itself as a country of logic, a country of control. Then you hit the shores of Lake Kivu and the town of Goma, just inside the Democratic Republic of Congo. It's beautiful, stunning countryside, the waters of the lake lapping against the shore, the hills receding into the bluish haze of the distance. But the town is pervaded by a sense of nihilistic pointlessness. Endless white UN 4x4s bump their way over the potholed roads, ferrying well intentioned internationals between their bases and the headquarters of the NGOs. Swarms of motorbike taxis also ply the crumbling streets. Massive. Perched precariously on the back are people scurrying about, trying desperately to make a buck or two in the frenetic atmosphere of the border town. Looming over all of this activity is Mount Nyiragongo, this majestic volcano which rises out of the jungle into the clouds last erupted a decade ago. It sent two rivers of molten rock running straight into the town, consuming whole neighborhoods in flames. From time to time, Nyiragongo belches and splutters, as if to remind the people below of the futility of their endeavours. But the real threat here is not the unstoppable destructive forces of nature. Rather, it is man's insatiable appetite for conflict. The last big Congo war started in 1998. It's also known as the Great African War. It sucked in at least six African nations and involved a couple of dozen armed groups. More than 5 million people lost their lives. It officially ended in 2003, then again in 2008. This last rebellion is a small aftershock of that war. Rwanda is accused of supporting the mutiny, a charge the government hotly denies. But some of the Rwandan Hutus who orchestrated the genocide fled across the border into Congo in 1994. They're still active, and so Kigali's logic has always been to exercise at least some control over the chaos on its border. We spent a night in Virunga national park, the center of the latest fighting. The head warden is a Belgian by the name of Emmanuel de Merode. His struggle to protect the park and its population of mountain gorillas provides a small snapshot of the multitude of conflicts that plague the region. On our way, we'd driven along a dirt track in search of a Congolese army colonel. We never found him. Instead, we saw deserted villages, empty houses, the occasional group of soldiers roaming the countryside. De Merode took us up in his small aeroplane and flew us over the vastness of the park. Here he pointed. A plume of smoke rising into the air was evidence of those Hutu rebels, the former genocidaire, cutting down the forest for charcoal. Other groups inhabit the slopes of the volcano, others still the plains where the elephants roam. And yet others run a racket, extorting money from illegal fishermen or the lake. As we lay in our tents that night, the sounds of mortars and heavy machine gun fire mingled with the alarm calls of birds and primates. The ground here is as fertile for the flora and fauna as it is for the armed groups. They break up and reform, merge and split, sprouting an endless series of shifting alliances. They're motivated by a mixture of economic interest and historical grievance. Some are simply gangs of poachers or bandits. Neither Demurode, nor the UN peacekeepers, nor even the Congolese army seems able to control them. There's another saying about this part of the eastern Congo. It looks like heaven, but it feels like hell.
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Gabriel Gatehouse in Congo to many in India, love is still a dirty word. It's what shameless girls and wayward boys do. And those who dare to get together without official and parental approval face abuse in the street, harassment from hard line religious groups that sometimes publicly beaten by the police. But now a group calling itself the Love Commandos is stepping in to offer help to lovers. As Anu Anand's been finding out, it's offering legal advice and shelter, arranging marriage ceremonies and helping to resettle couples away from their tormentors.
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Rajveer Singh is a handsome man of 23. He has large earnest eyes and hair that falls over his forehead. He's well built and thoughtful. When Rajvir was 12, a new family moved into the house across the Narrow Alley. The first time he saw Madri, she was then 14. He says he fell in love. I thought to myself, this is the girl I want to marry. She was mischievous, she had a beautiful smile and I knew that she'd look after me. Madri, a petite, bright eyed woman with a winning smile, says she felt the same. Over the years, as Rajvir and Madhuri went to school together, shared their best hopes and worst fears. They fell utterly in love. You know what happens next. This is India where parents vet a potential marriage partner. Like NASA scientists checking a space shuttle before liftoff. Caste, complexion, Horoscope, Height, Character, qualifications, family eating habits. Love just doesn't get a look in. So when Rajvir and Madhuri told their families they wanted to marry, the answer was a resounding no. Rajvir's family are takurs, landowners. Madhuri's are baniyas traders. Apparently incompatible. But they were undeterred as Madhuri's family took her back to her ancestral village to forcibly betroth her to a more suitable boy. Rajveer hatched a plan he called the Love Commandos. Perhaps you're picturing them now. Tall, chivalrous men in tights, wielding swords and roses. Well, not quite. A group of aging businessmen and journalists, the Love commandos began 10 years ago as a movement to protect lovers from harassment by both Hindu and Muslim hardliners. One of their co founders, Sanjoy Sachdeva, is a rumpled white haired hack whom I met after a series of phone calls. Come to the Imperial Cinema. Come alone. One of my commandos will meet you down a fly blown alley in Paharganj near New Delhi railway station where backpackers sip fruit juice at open stalls and disemboweled Televisions are repaired on the street. I met Sanjoy in one of the Love Commando's secret shelters. It had all the charm of a broom closet. But in India, where falling in love is a provocative social and political statement and a safe broom closet can come in very handy, Sanjay explained that the image of a commando is central to the helpline he and his colleagues operate. Indian lovers need protection and they need to believe that they'll receive it. Madhuri managed to escape from her relative's house in the village and met Rajvir at a train station, knowing they were guaranteed sanctuary back in Delhi. That same evening, they arrived at the Love Commando's shelter to find flowers, clothes and some simple jewelry for Madhur. And more importantly, they found smiles of encouragement and good wishes. Within hours, they were man and wife. On paper, it's very Romeo and Juliet, or the eastern equivalent, Layla and Majnu. But in reality, rescuing lovers is expensive. In Delhi alone, the Commando's monthly operation costs up to £3,000. After pontificating about love over a cigarette, Sunjoy pins me with his green eyes and says plaintively, we need money. We're broke. Our friends are broke. I'm not sure how long we can sustain this. Still, he and his commandos fervently believe that the only way to change India's caste driven society is through love marriages. They hope that the children born of such unions will be freer and more equal. But if Rajvir and Madhuri's story is any barometer, change will come grudgingly, violently. Last year, after the couple dared to move back to their old neighborhood, Rajvir was held at knifepoint by four men. They drove him to a secluded spot, tied him up, beat him severely and left him for dead. At first, the police refused to act. With the commander's help, they did eventually file a report. No one has been charged. Madhuri is convinced her own family was involved. She says recently, someone toppled a pile of bricks from a shared rooftop onto the couple's bed. Luckily, they weren't in it. According to UNICEF, nearly 40% of India's billion plus population are under the age of 18. Falling in love here isn't easy. But more couples are choosing to brave the consequences. For the Love Commandos, love is war. And as long as they can afford it, they don't intend to surrender peacefully.
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That's Anu Anand in Delhi. The Pope's been talking about the latest scandal to engulf the Vatican. After the arrest of his butler on charges of stealing private correspondence, he told the crowd at his weekly audience in St. Peter's Square that he was saddened by the betrayal. The man's detention has resulted in new headlines in an Italian media already engorged on stories about alleged money laundering, malpractice and cronyism inside the Vatican. There's also a new book which chronicles the intrigue and infighting amongst senior cardinals. David Willey has been hearing suggestions that the 85 year old pontiff is losing control of his church and the people who are supposed to be helping him run it.
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Pope Benedict complained bitterly at his latest general audience about the international media. He said they'd unfairly latched onto the admittedly very unusual story of the arrest of his butler to distort the truth about recent goings on at the Catholic Church's power centre here in Rome. Yet he looked saddened and understandably angry about this invasion of his privacy in his own home on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace. Every day the Italian media give their latest version about what they call the Vatileaks crisis, which has been headline news. The unfortunate butler in whose grace and favour home just inside the walls of the Vatican police found a stash of confidential documents from the Pope' has been held incommunicado since his arrest. The unanswered question for whose benefit did he acquire this mass of correspondence? Some of it quite recent. During the pontificate of the late Pope John Paul ii, we now know that some Polish prelates working inside the Vatican were passing confidential internal documents to Moscow via Warsaw. The Vatican has always been targeted by spies, as we also know from the memoirs of the British Ambassador to the Holy See during the Second World War. The Ambassador actually lived inside Vatican territory during the German occupation of Rome. But the latest outbreak of whistleblowing and spying inside the Vatican is on a scale without precedent in living memory, the moles which have been burrowing into the Vatican's contemporary archives and the personal papers of the Pope, the Italians also call them corvi, or crows, seem intent not so much on discrediting the Pope himself, but rather his number two, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. Reading between the lines, we have an image of an organisation with little internal cohesion and some very frustrated personal egos. Vatileaks is quite different from WikiLeaks because we're dealing here with hard copy, actual letters, not emails or electronic records. Although the Vatian is fully computerized and has its own secure cell phone network, the Pope himself doesn't work in front of a computer screen. He writes by hand, minuting correspondence. He is seen with the letter B. Followed by the Roman numeral 16. What emerges from the photocopies of papal correspondence published in Gianluigi Nuzzi's book is is that when the pope receives letters, they're often handed direct to his secretary by intermediaries. They don't necessarily arrive in his office through the Vatican mails. Mr. Nuzzi writes in his book that his vatileques come from at least three separate sources inside the Vatican, so narrowing the search for the moles or the crows shouldn't prove an insuperable task for investigators. The very small number of employees holding positions of confidence within the headquarters of the Catholic Church makes any comparison with the government to a normal state, say the Italian state, quite meaningless. The Vatican City state has a tiny resident population of less than a thousand cardinals, bishops and monsignore and their staff sleeping inside its walls when the gates close every night shortly after 11pm during the day, several thousand other Vatican employees come in and out of Vatican territory, the most senior of them parking their cars in the imposing Belvedere courtyard. An interesting clue to the tectonic power shifts inside the Vatican, which continue as the Ratzinger papacy enters its eighth year, comes from an Italian blogger quoting an anonymous senior cardinal While the American cardinals and bishops declare war on President Obama over questions of religious freedom and the right to life, this cardinal says, inside the Vatican, the cardinals are at war with each other. At a private birthday lunch, Pope Benedict was overheard to remark, these Italians, why are they always disturbing the pope with their Italian quarrels? The College of Cardinals, which will elect Pope Benedict's successor, was skewed unfairly towards Italians when the last bunch of red hat promotions were announced. Italians still hold an undue proportion of votes and influence in a church which is increasingly seen to be shifting south, away from its former Eurocentric mould. The pope intends to redress this imbalance by bringing in more foreigners into church governance and increase the chances that when the white smoke goes up again to announce his successor, yet another non Italian pope might appear on the balcony of St Peter's to the acclaim of the faithful.
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David Willie In Rome, glasses were raised to Mitt Romney in that part of Brooklyn known as Brighton beach this week. This small corner of the city traditionally votes Republican, and they were celebrating the Romney primary win in Texas, which makes it official he's the man who'll challenge for the presidency this November. Brighton beach is also the city's most fascinating ethnic enclave. New York magazine described it as a Jewish immigrant's idea of what an American's idea of Russia should be. And with summer arriving on the Eastern seaboard, the beach is once again the place to be. Just 10 miles from Wall street, and you're bathing in the Atlantic. Reggie Nadelson's been getting a view from the boardwalk.
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You hear more English in Odessa in the summer than here in Brighton beach, says Ramon, a waiter at Restaurant Tatiana. A recent immigrant from Ukraine, Ramon was a waiter on ships all over the world, but like hundreds of thousands before him, he dreamed of America. I am so happy to be here, he adds, bringing me a glass of Russian Standard vodka. It surprised me, finding a whole new cast of young immigrants here in the coastal area of Brooklyn they sometimes call Little Odessa. And though it's more than two decades since the former Soviet Union fell, you can still get a whiff of the bad old days. Do you mind if I look around? I say to the saleswoman in one of the fashion stores, a feline blonde in black with several scarves and a lot of rings. She looks me over, shrugs and, in that sullen voice says haughtily, if you really have to. The clothes feature a lot of sequins. At the next store, luscious furs are retailed often to former denizens of Brighton beach who have moved out and up, but return to shop and eat. There are food stores and bookstores, all featuring Russian products, the signs all in Russian. Occasionally, a furious old man with food in his beard pushes ahead of you. On the street. At Tatiana, I struggle with so much choice crab and caviar, duck salad with tangerines and nuts, baked sturgeon and blinny, not to mention beef stroganoff. Deliveries of more food, more drink, more produce arrive every 10 minutes as the restaurant gears up for high season. Perhaps the race memory of too little choice and sometimes too little food is still palpable on Brighton Beach. Out here, everyone smokes. The waiters on their brakes smoke. On a bench not far away, an elderly couple in wide brimmed hats raise a pair of nylon umbrellas against the sun and light up. But why is that slightly scary fellow staring at me? Then I realize it's the Reelect Obama button on my jacket. This is a little bastion of Republicans in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. These are people who remember the Soviet Union all too well and resist what they see as big government and anti business programs. They may be liberal on social issues like abortion, but anything that feels like socialism, even if it's not, makes them queasy. In Brooklyn, Republicans have found a home by the sea. Romney supporters will no doubt rally here all summer Long though it is hard to imagine those political suits noshing their way through borscht and herring and smoke tongue at Restaurant Tatiana. Or partying all night at the Rasputin nightclub where the dancers are hot and the clothes are mani. From my seat at Restaurant Tatiana, I can see the Atlantic Ocean and the whole sweep of Brooklyn coast. To the left is Sheepshead Bay, where party boats take you out for night fishing. Fishermen of every race and nationality fish for blues and striped bass or Borgies, whatever is running. And to the right, of course, is Coney island, the legendary seaside resort where the amusement park was the object of my childhood obsessions. We are only 10 miles from Wall street, but this is for many the seacoast of summer paradise. The big event on June 23 this year is the Mermaid Parade. As the parade moves by, more and more astonishing creatures appear as from a fantasy sea, some very scantily clad. As it turns out, nudity is legal in New York State. Who knew? Many of the costumes have a touch of the burlesque show at night is the Mermaid Ball, a sort of after party with tail fins. 15 pounds will get you in and you can dance to the sounds of live bands. Dance with live mermaids as they are billed, who include Rosie Larouge and Sasha Fire Gypsy. By the time you leave, you will have made a real splash here. And just then, the dazzling fireworks go off in the sky over the ocean, announcing the real beginning of summer in the city.
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And with Reggie Nagelson working on her costume for the Mermaid Parade down there on Brighton beach, we've reached the end of another edition. There'll be two next week on Thursday and Saturday mornings. Do join us. Goodbye.