← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Memorable Despatches
00:28:36
A chance to hear in full the despatches referred to in the 60th Anniversary Special.
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Hello.
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From the. From our own correspondence studios at Broadcasting House in London, you've downloaded the latest edition of the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Hello. This programme's 60 years old this month, but feeling fitter than ever. Perhaps you heard the discussion about our six decades of foreign coverage on Radio 4 earlier this morning. Some of the panellists and correspondents in the audience mentioned particular dispatches they remembered. So as part of our special series of programmes this week and next, we're bringing you those reports in full. They include the frightening days of genocide in Rwanda, the story of the only grand piano in Gaza, a letter to a correspondent's newborn son and why a doctor in Paris prescribed Roquefort cheese. We start in Afghanistan when not every loud bang you heard in the neighbourhood was a bomb. In spring 2012, the then British and American missions in Afghanistan seemed very precarious. Soldiers had been killed and there was speculation the timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops would be speeded up. The pull out had been scheduled for 2014, and as we now know, the autumn of that year was indeed when the coalition withdrew. Lise Doucet lived in Kabul in the 1980s and has been a frequent visitor to the city ever since. When she went back in March 2012, she found that despite the instability, the mood there was not all pessimistic.
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The first explosion sounded at midnight across Kabul. Afghans froze, held their breath. Some were jolted from sleep. I also stopped and listened closely. Was it a bomb? The night went silent. Then a staccato burst of sound rang out. Gunfire. I went out to the roof terrace to see if the black night sky would reveal its secret. And there it was, a cascade of brilliant orange lights flaring, fizzling, then exploding again. Fireworks to usher in the Persian New Year now rose, celebrated by Afghans and some neighbors too. There hadn't been a celebration of this kind for as long as most Afghans could remember. On the roof terrace next door, children's excited squeals of laughter was the other sweet music of this night. And when night gave way to day, a new year dawned. The roof terrace became the stage for a symphony of bird song. Sparrows tweeted, swallows traced long sweeping arcs in the sky, signalling a long, hard winter was over. And then a black magpie came to rest with its distinctive stripes of white and blue. Afghans call it the good news bird. And what good news it brought that day. News of nothing more, but nothing less than the kind of day you might call, well, normal somewhere else in the world. But not in a country that's lived through more than 30 years of war. Streets were free of the congestion and fumes that normally clog this crowded city. Children in sparkling New Year clothes ran after the tinkling tunes of an ice cream cart. I even caught some policemen sleeping in the warm spring sun as I went past a parade of shops fronted by a modern landmark. The big black sign with uneven white lettering be Beautiful Salon cobble, despite its growing maze of ugly security barriers, did seem beautiful. But just a day earlier, there'd been warnings to stay indoors. A fierce dust storm tore across the city, whistling through the poorest of crumbling homes, shutting down the airport. Afghans have a saying for moments like this. When the winds blow past, something will come to pass. Something bad. But the day passed without incident. And so did the next. I dropped in on Afghan friends to enjoy a nowruz treatment aft meva 7 dried fruits, from almonds to apricots, served in sweet syrup. This year, Afghans are more focused than ever on the year ahead and the year after that. By 2014, most of 130,000 foreign troops here will be gone. But while Nowruz was sweet, the political mood is sour. Far more sour than anyone would have imagined when Afghans hailed the return of the west in 2001, when US led forces toppled the Taliban. So sour there's even constant reference to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which ended in early 1989. I lived in Kabul then. That new year was full of uncertainty. How long would the brutal war against Afghan mujahideen fighters go on? This year they're asking, how long will war against the Taliban continue? And will it get even worse? Just as worrying, there's mounting Afghan anger against those who should be their friends, their allies, and, in particular, U.S. forces. After a series of incendiary incidents, the inadvertent burning of the quran at a US military base, a nighttime massacre of 16 Afghan civilians. When a visibly tired President Karzai met tribal elders from that village, he told them they were fighting two demons. He meant the TALIBAN and the U.S. the president insists he speaks for his people. There's no denying Afghan disenchantment with a partnership which hasn't been as smooth or successful as many dared hope. But some Afghans worry their president's very public rebukes could cause NATO troops to pull out even faster, plunging their country into greater danger. However you look at it, these next two years are fraught with uncertainty and risk. Afghans saw in this new year with a dark dust storm and then a Bright spring sun. Two omens for a people who start another year not really knowing what it will bring, but knowing all too well it could go either way.
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And that's Leeds Doucet. Another place which is no stranger to conflict is the Palestinian territory of Gaza. In recent years, devastating wars with Israel have left places in the Strip in ruins. Many reasons for these confrontations are given, disputed by both sides. Rockets have been fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip, and blockades of Gaza's borders and coastline have led to shortages of many basic goods, as well as anger and a sense of isolation. So when Tim Whewell heard that a grand piano had been found there earlier this year, the only grand piano in the territory, and. And that it was being restored to its former glory, he knew this was a Gaza story with a difference, and he set off to investigate.
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Yogin Aladawi's delicate fingers dance enthrallingly across the ivories, and in my imagination, I'm transported from the dense urban squalor of Gaza to the wide, wild foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. She's playing Chopin unselfconsciously, intensely, as she must once have played him in her youth in the Russian city of Vladikav Kaz, far, far away from this besieged concrete warren on the Mediterranean. And for a few glorious, dizzying bars of etude opus 10, number one in C major, she too is transported. She forgets. I'm standing behind her in a poky practice room in a music school based, bizarrely, in an ambulance station, and her lips, her lipsticked lips, purse in concentration. Then she remembers me, and she tells a story about something that happened 15 years ago, soon after she first came to Gaza to be with her husband, a Palestinian doctor she met when he was studying in Russia. She was a professional piano teacher and accompanist, trained at the Rostov State Rachmaninov Conservatory. Music was her world. She moved to a land that barely knew Rachmaninov or Chopin. She had no instrument to play. But after three months, she happened to be at an event hosted by the Red Crescent, where there just happened to be a piano. Knowing who she was, the chairman of the Palestinian Red Crescent, Fatih Arafat, the younger brother of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, invited her to play, and afterwards he described what he saw. Juliena settled herself at the piano and completely forgot there was a huge crowd around her. She was, Arafat said, like a parched traveler in the desert who eventually finds a well and drinks and drinks until their thirst is quenched. Remembering that moment, Yulena throws back her uncovered head and laughs in a manner that is not of the women of Gaza. Her first years here were tough. In all its long history, Gaza has never been known as a beacon of the arts. In biblical times, it was a philistine stronghold. Juliana arrived long before the militant Islamists of Hamas took over in 2007, but already Gaza was becoming steadily more conservative, with some rejecting music as haram forbidden by God. Yogiena cad sheet music off Scandinavians who passed through for international agencies. But she was the only piano teacher in Gaza, and music wasn't isn't on the curriculum of any ordinary Gaza school, neither the UN nor the government ones. Her thirst to work as she used to was only finally satisfied seven years ago with the opening of Gaza's first music school, which about 200 children now attend. In the evenings when I meet Elena there, she's rehearsing the terrifyingly wide hand stretches of the Chopin for an unprecedented event. For the first time since she left Russia, she's about to play on a concert grand, a grand piano in Gaza. I thought I was somewhere else, she says of the moment she first saw it. It's the only such instrument in the Strip, a diplomatic gift, some say from Japan, though no one quite remembers. But till recently, even the musicians of Gaza didn't know it was there. They discovered it two years ago in a disused theatre, its strings rusting away. But before they could get it restored, the latest round of the conflict with Israel intervened and the building was wrecked by a rocket. But almost miraculously, the instrument survived, and now a young piano restorer has been brought from France by a charity called Music Fund to bring it slowly, lovingly back to life. The piano is not for Juliana, of course, though those Russian fingers can't wait to caress its keys. It's for Palestinians. Palestinians like Juliana's star pupil, Sara, a startlingly self possessed 15 year old who describes in her matter of fact teenage way the three wars she's lived through. It's like you're in an action movie, she says. Funny to say that we don't have shelters underground in Gaza, so we just have to run for our lives. Music, she says, kinda helps. It might not bring back your loved ones, but it makes you feel better. It helps you survive. Has it helped all those classical composers with complicated personalities that Juliena has taught her about? Chopin was such a romantic guy, she says, and Beethoven was deaf. If you look into their personal lives, she adds, you'll see they fought a lot and went through a lot too. Yes, I think as Eleanor launches into another vertiginous fight of arpeggios, but perhaps not quite as much as the people of Gaza. And they didn't have to wait so many years to practice on a grand piano.
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Tim Whewell, One of the panelists earlier this morning was Lindsay Hilsam, who now works at Channel 4 News. She remembered a piece she filed for this program in 1994. She was in Rwanda temporarily working for UNICEF when the long running resentment many Hutus had been harbouring against the Tutsis erupted to violence. 800,000 people were killed in the hundred days which followed. Most of the dead were Tutsi, most of the killers, Hutu.
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The first weekend I was in Rwanda, an age ago, at the beginning of February, Pasteur, one of the UNICEF drivers, took me to Biumba in the north of the country. He was nervous because there'd been a lot of fighting in Biumba during the civil war. When we arrived, he was surprised to see how calm it was, how life appeared to be getting back to normal, with people returning to their homes and planting their crops. Pasteur is dead now, killed by a band of thugs who attacked the mission compound where he was hiding last weekend. Michel, another driver, is dead too, as well as Pauline, one of the secretaries, her husband and three year old child, and Serge, the doctor and all his seven children. I find it unbearable to associate these people with the anonymous bodies I have seen piled outside the hospital mortuary, machete wounds gaping, their faces frozen into blank stares. I'm not claiming that I knew these people well or loved them, but I'd worked with them. I knew them as civilized people who, when I needed help because I was a foreigner in their country, gave it generously. I am a journalist and sometimes an aid worker. My livelihood depends to some extent on the misfortunes of others. What responsibility does that give me? All through the week, I've been speaking to Rwandans I know mainly people who work for unicef. By telephone. I've listened to their terrified voices recounting how the soldiers killed their next door neighbours, then came to their own houses, threatened to kill them, took all their money and said they'd be back to carry out the threat. Then there are those whom I couldn't contact, whose phones went down or who had no phone. What's happened to them? I did nothing to help these people when they really needed help. By the time I left Rwanda, I'd stopped ringing because I couldn't bear to hear the stories and have nothing to offer. I had no petrol in my car. I didn't really know where their houses were. I had no money and no food, and I was too scared to go and find them because I knew that if I tried to drive around town with tootsies in my car, I would become a target too. So I was useless. The United nations was useless, too. Senior UN staff begged for the rules to be bent to allow for the evacuation of local staff as well as expatriates. The answer from New York came back no. I know it would have been difficult. I know that getting foreigners out was complicated enough. But there is such a thing as responsibility. And maybe the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda could have played a role by trying to evacuate Rwandans, working for the UN and by intervening to try to stop the slaughter. The United nations has been active in trying to negotiate between the rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and government troops. But most of the deaths of the past week have been caused by attacks on civilians, by soldiers or armed thugs. The UN force was better armed than the Rwandan soldiers. But when the gendarmen presidential guard refused to let the UN troops pass roadblocks to the suburbs where the killings were going on, the UN gave in. When the slaughter was at its worst, the UN force was in its barracks. I know that if they tried to storm their way through the roadblocks, then more UN soldiers would have been killed. But if a UN force is supposed to keep the peace, how can it justify doing so little when the peace is brutally shattered and when tens of thousands of people are being hacked to death in their houses and on the streets? Since I left Kigali, I've been thinking about Oskar Schindler, the German who smuggled Jews out of Nazi Germany, whose name is now famous because of Steven Spielberg's film. I wonder if there are any Oskar Schindler's in Rwanda. I would like to think so. I would like to think that there was someone with the courage and the confidence it would take. If the institutions can't or won't do anything, the responsibility comes back to individuals. Just as I was leaving Rwanda, I bumped into another secretary from UNICEF who had managed to flee her home to somewhere slightly safer. I told her about Pasteur, Michel, Pauline and Serge. I regretted it because it was the first news of her colleague she had heard. She wept and clung to me and sobbed. Rwanda isn't a country anymore. There's nothing to do but run as far away as possible and never come back. Some will do that, of course, and hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees are expected to arrive in Burundi, Zaire and Tanzania, but most Rwandans will have no choice but to stay and live through the horror. Foreigners like me, of course, will be long gone to the next country with work to do and uneasy consciences to
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still Lindsay Hurlsome news is often bad news, but in this program our reporters also get the chance to talk about people or events that made them smile, the pleasures and the oddities and quirks of everyday life in another country. For example, we've always had a lot to say about France and so why is it French doctors recommend you give your toddlers a Roquefort cheese? That blue veined cousin of British stilton Jamie Kumarasami was our Paris correspondent from early 2000. On leaving, he looked back at what his time in France had taught him, including the Roquefort question.
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My time as a Parisian parent has ended as it began, with our children's paediatrician handing over the Roquefor file. It's now just over three and a half years ago that he first gave us a piece of paper suggesting that we add that venerable blue cheese to our daughter Maya's diet. How appropriate then, that during our last visit to him a few weeks ago, we were given a similar prescription for our 11 month old son, Finn. As we scanned the paper with a knowing nod, my wife and I remembered how on that first occasion we had pondered on the medicinal effects of the king of French cheeses and reached the conclusion that the blue mould must be good for a baby's stomach. But when we checked with our pediatrician later, we were met with an incredulous stare and the answer? It's just to get her used to the taste. It's not just her eating habits that he's been concerned about, but her demeanour as well. When Maya was a baby, she went to the pediatrician for a monthly check up. When I came home on the days of those visits, I was, or so I am told, as nervous as a parent waiting for an end of term report. It wasn't so much what the doctor had written about her health that concerned me, but the comments he had made in the margin. For this being Paris, he gave her marks for elegance and charm. One time he decided she was a belle poulette and on another occasion a lovely little lady, written in English rather sadly. I was more concerned about how he had rated her poise than whether he decided she had some terrible disease. And then, in no time at all, Meyer went from being a charming baby to a boozing toddler. When we asked our local boulangerie to bake a cake for her third birthday party. We were bemused, shall we say, when. When the impressive gateau came, infused with the unmistakable aroma of Grand Marnier. One bite was enough to tell us that it was soaked in the stuff. It turns out that this is common practice. In fact, the lady who runs Meier's Nursery has a strict rule about birthdays. Parents can only bring homemade cakes. I don't want a load of drunken kids on my hands, she says. Yes, you could be forgiven for thinking that innocence doesn't last long in France. Last summer, we were with some friends and their young children in the market in the town of Karjak in the Lot Valley, when we stumbled across an old bee keeper dressed in baggy blue shorts and a faded brown trilby hat. How quaint, we thought, when he offered to tell the children how honey is made. At first, as he began his often told tale, I was distracted by his uncanny resemblance to Francois Mitterrand. But then, as I began to pay attention to his words, I. I realized that these three and five year olds, thankfully with varying levels of French, were being told about the queen bee's pleasure at having a multitude of male partners simultaneously thrusting themselves upon her. Cutting short this tale of sexual bliss, we bought a couple of jars of his honey and made a bee line for our car. I have to say at this point that Meier hasn't had as pure a Parisian childhood as she might have done. Certainly not one the Academie Francaise would appreciate, because we're bringing her up bilingually. My wife Nanette, is Dutch. We decided to send her to an international nursery where, and we have to whisper this to our French friends, the lingua franca is English. Still, despite this linguistic deprivation, she's acquired an impressive range of what I can only call playground French. She can draw o with the best of them and is prone to tell naughty boys tes pageantitois. The one thing she hasn't acquired, though, is the French love of good food. Yes, she'll happily wolf down a pain au chocolat, but anything more sophisticated, well, forget it. I remember having lunch in the picturesque village of Saint Cerc la Popie and asking for the children's menu. We were in the heart of Quercy, foie gras land, one of France's great culinary regions. And the children's menu didn't consist of chips or sausages, just of smaller portions of confit de canards and andouillette. So when we asked for ketchup, there seemed to be a collective intake of breath throughout the crowded restaurant before the waiter's curt reply came. No, monsieur, it's our homemade mustard or nothing. And here again, we're guilty. Yes, when the Roquefort file was passed to us all those years ago, we dismissed its recommendations. As a result, Meyer hasn't acquired the taste for either that particular cheese or indeed for pretty much any other variety of cheese that isn't processed. We have failed her, but there's still some hope for our son Finn. And so when we get back to England, our first purchase may well be a block of Roquefort, one of the national symbols of the country we're leaving behind.
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Jamie, Kumar, Sami and his children are now teenagers and they still don't like blue cheese. That's what comes of ignoring doctor's orders. Many correspondents are parents, but not all of them spend long periods reporting from war zones. Fergal Keene did back in 1996. His wife Anne had a little boy they called Daniel Fergal in Hong Kong at the time, wrote for this program about being a new father. It became one of our most popular dispatches, but not everyone liked it. This morning's discussion had a radio critic saying it made her feel ill. Others, however, have found it an unforgettable Listen,
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my dear son, it is 6 o' clock in the morning on the island of Hong Kong. You are asleep, cradled in my left arm, and I am learning the art of one handed typing. Your mother, more tired yet more happy than I have ever known her, is sound asleep in the room next door. And there is soft quiet in our apartment since you've arrived. Days have melted into night and back again, and we are learning a new grammar, a long sentence whose punctuation marks are feeding and winding and nappy changing. And these occasional moments of quiet. Your coming has turned me upside down and inside out. So much that seemed essential to me has in the past few days, taken on a different colour. Like many foreign correspondents I know, I've lived a life that on occasion has veered close to the edge. War zones, natural disasters, darkness in all its shapes and forms. In a world of insecurity and ambition and ego, it's easy to be drawn in, to take chances with our lives, to believe that what we do and what people say about us is reason enough to gamble with death. Now, looking at your sleeping face inches away from me, listening to your occasional sigh and gurgle, I wonder how I could ever have thought glory and prizes and praise were sweeter than life. And it's also true that I am pained, perhaps haunted is a better word, by the memory suddenly so vivid now, of each suffering child I have come across on my journeys. To tell you the truth, it's nearly too much to bear at this moment to even think of children being hurt and abused and killed. And yet, looking at you, the images come flooding back. 10 year old Ande Mikhail, dying from napalm burns on a hillside in Eritrea. How his voice cried out, growing ever more faint when the wind blew dust onto his wounds. The two brothers, Domingo and just in Manong, southern Angola, just three years old and blind, dying from malnutrition, being carried on 10 year old Domingo's back. And Domingo's words to me, he was nice before, but now he has the hunger. Last October in Afghanistan, when you were growing inside your mother, I met Sharjah, age 12, motherless, fatherless, guiding me through the grey ruins of her home. Everything was gone, she told me, and I knew that for all her tender years, she had learned more about loss than I would likely understand in a lifetime. There is one last memory of Rwanda and the churchyard of the parish of Nyarubuye, where in a ransacked classroom I found a mother and her three young children huddled together where they'd been beaten to death. The children had died holding onto their mother. That instinct we all learn from birth and in one way or another cling to until we die. Daniel these memories explain some of the fierce protectiveness I feel for you, the tenderness and the occasional moments of blind terror when I imagine anything happening to you. But there is something more, a story from long ago that I will tell you face to face, father to son, when you were older. It's a very personal story, but it's part of the picture. It has to do with the long lines of blood and family, about our lives and how we can get lost in them and, if we're lucky, find our way out again into the Sunlight. It begins 35 years ago in a big city on a January morning with snow on the ground and a woman walking to hospital to have her first baby. She is in her early 20s and the city is still strange to her, bigger and noisier than the easy streets and gentle hills of her distant home. She's walking because there is no money and everything of value has been pawned to pay for the alcohol to which her husband has become addicted. On the way, a taxi driver notices her sitting, exhausted and cold, in the doorway of a shop, and he takes her to hospital for free. Later that day, she gives birth to a Baby boy. And just as you are to me, he is the best thing she has ever seen. Her husband comes that night and weeps with joy. When he sees his son. He is truly happy. Hungover, broke, but in his own way, happy. For they were both young and in love with each other and their son. But Daniel Time had some bad surprises in store for them. The cancer of alcoholism ate away at the man and he lost his family. This was not something he meant to do or wanted to do. It just was. When you were older, my son, you will learn about how complicated life becomes, how we can lose our way and how people get hurt inside and out. By the time his son had grown up, the man lived away from his family, on his own in a one roomed flat, living and dying for the bottle. He died on 5 January, one day before the anniversary of his son's birth. All those years before in that snowbound city. But his son was too far away to hear his last words, his final breath. And all the things they might have wished to say to one another were left unspoken. Yet now, Daniel, I must tell you that when you let out your first powerful cry in the delivery room of the Adventist hospital and I became a father, I thought of your grandfather and, foolish though it may seem, hoped that in some way he could hear across the infinity between the living and the dead your proud statement of arrival. For if he could hear, he would recognize the distinct voice of family, the sound of hope, of new beginnings that you, in all your innocence and freshness have brought to the world.
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Fergal Keen in Hong Kong in 1996, still reporting for the BBC today. And that's it. Saturday's programme for the first time in these 60 years, a UK special. Five dispatches from home, correspondence. I hope you'll join us. Goodbye.