← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
May 14, 2011
00:28:04
Assisted suicide: as the people of Zurich in Switzerland prepare to vote on the issue,...
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Transcript14 lines
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Hi there.
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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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As ever, it's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today, the Swiss couple who sat down and fixed a day for dying. Hidden pages of history come to light as the Queen prepares for next week's visit to Ireland. We hear about the mood in Benghazi as the rebels battle against Colonel Gaddafi grinds on and take to the river in Peru to try to find out why is the Amazon dolphin pink. People in the Swiss city of Zurich go to the polls tomorrow to vote on assisted suicide. There are two proposals. One to ban the practice altogether, the other to limit it only to Zurich residents. The votes reflect growing unease in Switzerland over so called suicide tourism, foreigners coming to the country to end their lives. But the principle of assisted suicide does have widespread support among the Swiss. Many believe choosing when and how they die should be a personal, individual matter. Nevertheless, as Imogen folks has been hearing, the journey towards that decision can be a difficult one.
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This is the story of Ruth and Edward told to me by Ruth, because Edward isn't here anymore. A middle class Swiss couple, they lived happily together for 50 years in a beautiful traditional old house just outside Zurich. She was a psychologist, he a minister. They had four children together. Like many liberal professionals in this country, they believed firmly in personal responsibility and in their own individual right to choose. In their 40s they had made living wills asking that they be allowed to die should they be involved in accidents which left them in irrecoverable comas. And so when Edward, shortly after retiring, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, he decided very early on that he wanted quality of life, not quantity. He said to me, I can't imagine not knowing you anymore. Ruth told me I want to die. Before that, Ruth and Edward contacted an assisted suicide organization to ask for help. Was it possible for a patient with Alzheimer's? The answer was complicated. Yes, it would be possible, but only as long as the patient was still fully aware and fully capable of making and communicating his wish to die. That meant Ruth realised that Edward would have to choose to die while his quality of life was still relatively good. It fell to Ruth, the doctors and the assisted suicide counsellor to monitor Edward and to tell him if they thought he was getting worse. The first two or three years were good. Ruth remembers. We went on trips together by car. I did the driving, but he still criticised. She smiles. But bit by bit, Edward's Mind began to fail. He stopped being able to read, Ruth says. He used to say, I've just read the newspaper, and I can't remember what it said. Edward was a man who had over a thousand books in his house. He would ask me, am I getting worse? Ruth says. And I would say, well, yes, but you know that you feel it yourself. And at times, Edward was bitter about his situation. He said, life is still so beautiful. You are beautiful. Why do I have to die? And I told him, you don't have to. Whatever you decide, I am with you. But Edward never really wavered. As a minister, he had visited many Alzheimer's sufferers in care homes, and he knew he didn't want that for himself. One day in the spring, Ruth and Edward's oldest son came to visit. Edward could not remember his name. It's Michael, ruth told him. The doctor and the counsellor talked to Edward. Ruth remembers the counsellor said to him, edward, speak with your soul and ask, how would it be perhaps to die in May. I was shocked, she says. I said, why so soon? I thought we could have another summer together. The problem was Edward's illness was taking away his capacity to think and to recognize his situation. So if his wish to die before he lost those abilities completely were to be respected, he had to make a decision soon. Ruth and Edward did have their summer, and they went to Italy. When we came back, we knew it was time, she says. We sat down and we fixed a day for dying. October, a beautiful autumn, and the last week of Edward's life. And now Ruth faced a profound dilemma. He said to me, could we wait just one week more? She says. And I was so worried if we waited, he would never get what he really wanted. So they sat together and talked about it. And she said to him, edward, no. What is one week against a life together of 50 years? And he said, yes, you're right. I will do it. And so on that last day, Ruth and Edward went for a walk. We rustled through the autumn leaves, she remembers, and we talked about our life together, the good and the bad. And we laughed and we cried. Then they came home, and Edward, fully conscious of what he was doing, drank a glass of wine and then took the drugs provided by the assisted suicide organization. Six years later, Ruth knows her story will shock. Even in Switzerland, where assisted suicide has widespread support, she has received hate mail. But she doesn't regret the way Edward's life ended. I was with him to the last minute, she says, and we had a good goodbye. And I still talk to him. I go to his grave and I say, it's ok, you did it well.
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And that was Imogen Foulkes. The city of Benghazi, in the east of Libya has played second fiddle to the capital Tripoli, throughout most of Colonel Gaddafi's long rule. But today, as the centre of operations for the rebel trying to overthrow Gaddafi and protected by NATO air cover, it's enjoying a higher profile. This week, the European Union announced it would be opening an office there, while David Cameron invited the rebels to open a formal office in London. Andrew Harding says there's a real feeling among people in Benghazi that their time has at last arrived.
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I'm strolling along the blustery seafront in Benghazi. A middle aged man rushes up to me, grins, then starts to pant heavily. It takes a few awkward moments before I work out that he's miming. He wants to tell me that Libya was suffocating. But now people here can breathe again. Colonel Gaddafi's leering caricature is scrawled on the walls around the harbour. A captured tank points its barrel out to sea. On a tent beside it, someone has painted the words no Fear. There is a giddy sense of pride and optimism here in the city where Libya's revolution began. Look at the pavements, says Molly Tahune proudly. She's a young academic who packed a rucksack and rushed back from a life in exile in London to help with an uprising that she had confidently predicted was still years away. How wrong I was, she says, and points down to the curb. Some young children roped off the road here yesterday and apparently on their own initiative, painted neat black and yellow stripes along the edges. We pass another group of teenagers who are setting out with brooms to tidy up a city square. We're all volunteers now, says Mollie. There's so much energy. We all know the challenges. But there's such a buzz here. Now Mollie's helping out in what passes for the local administration, translating documents, writing letters, trying to help build a brand new state from scratch. It's chaos, she admits. Some days I think we'll never get anywhere. But we are making progress. Perhaps it's naive, delusional, but we believe we can win this war. No one here is ready to see Libya remain divided. I pass a tiny stationery shop and the owner, 80 year old Abu Salan Tashani, rushes out to say hello. In 1947, he opened a bookshop just down the road, but I sold foreign bookshistory books. Gaddafi didn't like them, he says. The police came and gave my shop to someone else. I never got it back. Mr. Tashani takes out a pile of fading souvenir postcards showing Benghazi in the 1970s. I took the photos, he says. You can see my children in some of them. I ask him if Gaddafi's time is running out. He shrugs and raises his white eyebrows hopefully. A burst of gunfire echoes off the walls. I'm getting used to it now. The shooting normally starts in the evening, a casual, festive chorus directed, for the most part at the sky. One night, some boys took playful, wobbly aim at the lagoon outside our hotel. On another occasion, a dozen massive explosions turned out to be dynamite, thrown for fun into the same placid patch of water. It's surprising the city feels so calm, given how many guns and grudges there must be here. NATO fighter jets can take some of the credit for keeping Gaddafi's army at bay. But the tribal and political rivalries that still cause so much concern across Libya seem almost invisible on the streets here. After a day visiting the deadlocked front lines an hour and a half south of Benghazi, the I arranged to meet a man called Muhammad abu Naga. In 1998, he and some friends were arrested by Gaddafi's police, taken to Tripoli, beaten, starved, then held in a tiny, dark cell for three years. Only then were they charged with plotting a coup. It was ridiculous. We weren't political, says Mohammed. I was a medical student. We were interested in charity and civil society, but we were organized and the regime saw that as a threat. The judge turned out to be a distant relative, but he had his instructions and sentenced Mohammed and nine friends to 10 years in prison. Mohammed was released early in 2006, at the age of 29. Gaddafi was trying to make peace with the west, he says. I came home scared. My parents were scared, too. I felt dead, as if there were no more meaning to life. As he tells me this on a bench overlooking the harbour, the crowds start to gather nearby, ready for another afternoon of speeches, marches and revolutionary songs. Now I think we're in for a long fight, says Mohammed as he prepares to head off to join a youth group he's organising. Gaddafi's greatest crime was to take away our dreams. But now we have our dreams back, and we won't let them go.
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Andrew Harding in Benghazi. Security will be tight on Tuesday, when the Queen starts a visit to Ireland loaded with historical significance. It'll include a ceremony at Dublin's Garden of Remembrance, where those who died in the cause of Irish freedom are commemorated. She'll also go to Croke park stadium, where in 1920, during the Irish War of Independence, British troops fired in into the crowd at a football match, killing 14 spectators and players. But Fergal Keen says her visit won't just highlight the divisions between these close neighbours, it'll also celebrate the links between Britain and Ireland, many of whose troops lost their lives fighting for the British Empire.
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Across the valley, through the warm air came the ancient sounds of the mountains. I listened to the call of the herd boys and the tinkling of cow bells as they moved down the slopes and through the dried out riverbeds, making for the evening kraals. There the cooking fires were already lighting and in an hour they would be the only flickers of light in a darkness so complete it seemed as if the world had vanished. Even with two decades experience of traveling in Africa and countless visits to Zululand, I'm always captivated by its strange beauty. I say strange because it's the most restful place for those who are weary with the world. And yet war after war has been fought out here. Gazing into the dusk from the front step of Reg Strow's farmhouse, I tried to imagine how this African valley had seemed to the teenage boys from Dublin who tramped through here in 1899. Soldiers of the Queen Empress Victoria making their way to do battle with the Boers at the bloody field of Colenso. Many, if not most, were the so called shilling a day men whose fathers and grandfathers had served the British Empire not out of patriotic fervor, but to feed their families or to escape the misery of the tenement slums of Dublin or Galway or Cork. Men of twelve different Irish regiments fought in South Africa and more than a thousand of them are buried there. It's a story that tells much of Ireland's divided past, because facing the Dubliners at the Battle of Colenso were Irish nationalists who'd come to South Africa to fight on the Boer side. It was the next best thing to fighting the British in Ireland, recalled Reg Strow, the great, great grandson of the Boer president Paul Kruger. Strow, who puffed determinedly on a long bowled boar pipe, told me that his own father, who had also encountered the Irish, had been a little afraid of them. Afraid? I asked, surprised. Well, they were a bit rough, he answered. In Ireland, the Boer War became a great test of loyalty to the British crown. When Queen Victoria visited in 1900, the last British queen to do so, pro Boer sympathisers demonstrated and out of this movement would Spring, the nationalist advance guard, which rebelled against the Crown in 1916 and led the way to an independent Irish state. Growing up in Ireland, it was that rebellion and the nationalist triumph that defined the national narrative. The subject of the Irish and Empire was taboo. Only years later, when I developed an interest in history, did I notice that the names of the great South African battles, Colenso Talana, ladysmith Speun Kop were etched into the archway that led into the most popular park in the city. Fusiliers arch at St. Stephen's Green was built in honour of the Dubliners who fell in South Africa. Irish nationalists called it Traitor's Gate. It was possible to grow up in Ireland without ever learning of the role, sometimes benevolent, at other times inglorious of Irishmen in the conquest of other nations. The name Sir Michael o', Dewyre, one of the most famous imperial civil servants and a Catholic from County Tipperary, was unknown. But it was O'Dawer who presided over the brutal regime of repression in the Punjab, which included General Dyer's infamous massacre of unarmed civilians at Amritsar in 1919. From near my own home in Cork came another giant of the imperial age, Sir John Pope Hennessy, Catholic and Tory and one of the most enlightened of all colonial administrators. Today, one of Hong Kong's busiest streets still carries his name. From South Africa to Lahore to New Zealand and the West Indies, Irish administrators and soldiers enforced the Writ of Empire. Some did it for a soldier's pay, others because the colonial civil service offered middle class Catholics opportunities for promotion that they were denied in the more sectarian confines of Ireland itself. Only now, with the advent of the peace process and the profound changes that have taken place the north and south of the Irish border is it possible for the story of the Irish and Empire to be told. There's been a huge upsurge of interest in the topic, with a rich variety of books and pamphlets and university study courses. When Queen Elizabeth visits Ireland, she'll go to the National Garden of Remembrance, dedicated to those rebels who helped to break the link with the Crown. But she will also pay tribute at another memorial, a garden of stone near the banks of the River Liffey, where thousands of Irishmen who fell fighting in British uniform are commemorated. These two gestures in the same city would have been unthinkable when I was young. But Ireland and Britain are changed, separate nations, but no longer hiding from the past.
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We share Fergal Keane and he has a television series called the Story of Ireland starting on Monday night. That's on BBC two at seven. O' clock. For a country which is spending millions on its tourist industry, Saudi Arabia sees very few foreign tourists. Of course, millions do come each year on the annual hajj, or pilgrimage, but they're largely restricted to the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. So few foreigners make it to the Red Sea beaches, the country's spectacular mountains and deserts, or the ancient Nabataean ruins. Matthew Teller's just been to take a look at the city of Taif, a popular destination for holidaying Saudi families.
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East of Mecca, Highway 15 charges across the sweltering Tahama plain. Switchbacks, like the coils of a desert Viper, climb 6,000ft to Jebel Al Hada, the mountain of tranquility. The prophet Muhammad came this way 1,392 years ago, resting in the highland city of Taif and sampling the local grapes. Today, Ta' if is the focus of Saudi Arabia's multi billion pound domestic tourism industry. There are luxury hotels, holiday apartments and family picnic spots. And since Ottoman times, farms all around Taif have cultivated the damask rose, a pink 30 petaled beauty. At this time of year, by sunrise, Saleh Al Nimri is out in his fields with a team of workers, picking as many as 40,000 roses in a morning. If we leave the rose until noon, he tells me, all its perfume will evaporate. And that perfume of Arabia is indescribable. Robust, spicy and dizzyingly complex. It is almost literally a world away from the clear simplicity of an English rose. Every day during the spring harvest, lorries bring sackfuls of roses to factories all around Taif. Workers transfer the flowers to copper stills, each holding 20,000 heads. And then the process of distillation begins. 60 liters of fresh water is boiled down to 40 of concentrated rose water, which is then bottled for sale as a culinary and medicinal specialty. But the premium product is the slender film of rose oil left floating on top, which sells for an astonishing £25,000 a litre. It's only available in vials half the size of your finger, and the scent of it knocks you out. Shahab Al Qadi, owner of Taif's biggest rose factory, tells me his grandfather began with one. Still, now there are 60. A small, precise man in middle age, with neat silver beard and a brown robe, Al Kadi shows me around, explaining the economics of the business and how he uses the petal residue of after distillation for cattle feed. It makes the milk taste rosy for weeks. He grins a few days later in the airport departures lounge, still with the perfume of rose oil on my fingers, I find an empty seat to wait for my flight. A few places along sits a businessman in red checked head cloth and sparkling white robe, creases neatly ironed. After a minute or two, he leans over and speaks to me in English. They make these chairs deliberately uncomfortable, you know, he confides, and we get chatting. He says he is an accountant from a town in the north, returning after a company meeting. We talk about his work and then cautiously move on to politics. In a low voice he tells me how one man in his local town had tried to launch a protest a couple of weeks before. It failed and the police had carted the man off to a mental hospital. But, says the accountant, our media is not free. They didn't report any of it. While we talk, there's a constant click from his wooden prayer beads. Muslim men across the Arab world and beyond carry beads, ostensibly their device for prayer. Each bead, as it passes through the fingers, stands for One of the 99 sacred names of God in Islam. But more often people toy with them absentmindedly, even swinging them around carelessly on one finger while chatting on the phone. Nobody gives them a second glance. The accountant smiles conspiratorially, leans over and shows me his prayer beads. If they saw this, he says, I'd be in big trouble. I look down. In his palm, nestled in the coil of beads, is a small silver crucifix. I goggle. He closes his fist, leans back, and carries on, playing with what I now realize is a Catholic rosary. Apostasy, that is, the rejection of Islam by a Muslim carries the death penalty in Saudi. I look around. People are browsing the duty free normal life carries on. Nobody noticed. I'm a Muslim, of course, says the accountant. The beads are from my Christian lover in Beirut. I boggle at him. Saudi law allows adulterers to be punished with death by stoning. This man is carrying his personal protest with him in plain view, and he's chosen to reveal his act of rebellion to an audience of one in an airport lounge. We spend perhaps another five minutes together. He tells me about his wife and kids, shows me a photo of his house, and then he gets up, says goodbye, and goes off to catch his flight, briefcase in one hand, rosary in the other. He never asked me my name.
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I never asked him his, and that's Matthew Taylor. Last year the Amazon region suffered one of its worst droughts in recorded history. The river reached its lowest levels for half a century. Scientists do not know how much climate change played a part, but some computer models project More water shortages across the region as the planet warms. What is more certain is the impact of such droughts on local communities and wildlife. Like the pink dolphin, James Painter has been travelling deep into the Peruvian rainforest to find out how they're faring. Six months on, it's hard not to
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be intrigued by the Amazon's pink river dolphins. First, like their distant relations, the sea dolphin, they're curious and intelligent. Second, how did they end up in freshwater rivers thousands of miles from the sea? And then why on earth are they pink? So it was with some concern that I read reports last November that their numbers had dropped by almost a half in a remote part of the Peruvian Amazon where they are known to thrive. It was one of the areas worst affected by the drought. British and Peruvian researchers are monitoring the impact of the drought on the wildlife in a large conservation area the size of Wales called the Pacaya Samiria Reserve. It's what they call a flooded forest. But to get there requires something of an odyssey. First, you have to fly to Iquitos, a city of more than half a million. A hundred years ago, it was a classic rubber boom town, from where it was quicker to travel all the way down the Amazon and across the Atlantic to Liverpool than to Lima, just the other side of the Andes. It's still not connected to the outside world by a road. From iquitos, it's a 24 hour ride to the reserve on a wood decked boat restored with parts dating back to the rubber boom. The captain, Bernabe Guerrero, is a short, vaguely dapper man. Considering his 35 years of hard experience navigating the upper reaches of the Amazon, he's the sort of man who's not easily impressed. He's seen many a drought, but even he said it was bad. He repeated the phrase muchas playas, meaning not that everybody went to the beach, but that a lot of sand was exposed on the riverbanks on the way. Dr. Richard Bodmer from the University of Kent and an author of several studies of the region, explains why counting pink dolphins is a good way of measuring the impact of the drought. First, they are relatively easy to count. They also move out of the area when the rivers dry up. And finally, their numbers do not drop as a result of hunting, as the local Indian population hold them in great esteem. But he also reminded me how remarkable the pink Dolphins are. Between 10 and 20 million years ago, their ancestors were trapped when this region of the Amazon formed part of a large inland sea area. And unlike other dolphins, they have evolved necks which can move horizontally to get round the roots of trees. At this time of year the Amazon is full of water. A blaze of colourful wildlife, parakeets, kingfishers and a black collared hawk lines the route as we head upstream. Eventually we arrive at the black waters of the River Samira. We pause in one of the dolphins favourite spots and wait. I glimpse flashes of pink, but I actually hear them for longer than I can see them. They expel air loudly, like old men with a smoker's cough. Nearby, one of several communities of Kokama Indians is perched on the riverbank. In the last 10 years they've been involved in schemes to manage the forest in a sustainable way and so conserve it. But they in the forest face a variety of threats. There was an oil spill in the region last year and the area of flooded forest is so large that it's difficult to stop outsiders coming in and exploiting its resources. And now they have the extra worry of extreme weather events. The drought of last year was actually preceded in 2009 by record floods. Teddy Yurima, a 42 year old community leader, says the drought was the worst. He knew he's still very concerned whether the fish stocks will recover this year. The Kokama depend on the fish both to eat and to sell. But during the drought it was very difficult to travel for several months because the river was so low. The fish were left stranded in packed, rotting piles. The cormorants and other birds just picked out the best flesh and left the rest. We just don't want a repeat of that. Teddy said the early signs are that the fish stocks are recovering this year, as are the pink dolphins. Preliminary figures from the surveys carried out by Dr. Bobma and the conservation organization Earthwatch suggest that the numbers of dolphins are slightly up on the same period last year. But Dr. Bobma is keen to stress that these weather extremes are severely testing the resilience of the wildlife and people living in the flooded forest. The forest is like a grocery store, he says. Extreme flooding and drought can leave the store not so well stocked. Oh, and in case you're wondering, apparently no one really knows for sure why pink dolphins are pink. There are various theories, but Dr. Bodmer's favourite is that they've just caught the sun.
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The mysteries of the Amazon pink dolphin unravelled at last. James Painter there, bringing today's edition to a close. We're back next Saturday with more from around the world. I do hope you'll join us. Goodbye.