← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
New Enemies, New Friends
00:27:59
Correspondents around the world telling their stories: Lyse Doucet has been meeting of...
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Hello from the. From our own correspondence studios at Broadcasting House in London, you've downloaded the latest
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edition of the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today, no response to an international appeal for aid for millions of Syrians displaced in the coldest winter in decades. New enemies and new friends as French troops carry their fight to the Islamist rebels in West Africa. The Hungarian economy's on its knees, but it's boom time for the second hand shops of Buda Pest. And why are the French drinking half the wine they used to? We're off to a country bistro to find out. It's been another bloody week in Syria with government and opposition forces fighting in towns and cities across the country. The UN believes at least 60,000 people have been killed in two years of violence there. Millions have fled their homes. Many have sought shelter in neighboring countries. But Lise Doucet says those still in Syria are finding it harder than ever to survive.
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Drive around Damascus, you see the vestiges of times. Dip, dip, Cafe mocha and more luxury clothing shops which change their gleaming window displays with every new season of fashion. If you can afford it, you can still sit in wrought iron chairs and order steaming cappuccino with sprinkles of chocolate in a stylish Italian cup. Or still sit in elegant parks where young Syrian couples flirt and savor the sweet smell of jasmine. This is graceful Damascus. Damascus of old. This is the Syria that two years ago prided itself on being an Arab state sufficient in food and fuel. A middle income country with soaring highways and decent health care. No more. I'd never thought I'd see this, lamented a Syrian woman working with an international agency. I never thought I'd see the day when we'd be discussing the distribution of high energy biscuits. Those are the biscuits flown to impoverished countries facing famine, nations racked by war, unable to feed their people. That's not Syria. Not yet. But cracks are emerging. A punishing war that has left vast swathes of this country in ruin and is now steadily encroaching on the capital. There is still what's called the Damascus bubble, a place where civil servants dutifully go to work on public transport and children sit their exams. But that bubble is slowly, steadily being squeezed. On this trip to Syria, we saw queues for petrol that snake around the block, and Damascenes wait for hours just to buy their daily bread, standing outside government bakeries in the cold, then hurrying away with towering piles of flatbread. No one is starving. One Western aid official told me. But they've already started monitoring for malnutrition. But who will come to Syria's help? This is a country isolated by the west, under a growing list of sanctions, but also deeply suspicious of foreign aid. The biggest relief effort by far is traditional Syrian solidarity. Extended families are now living together, sometimes 30, 50 people to a house. Neighbors are opening their homes and hearts to each other, and sometimes to strangers fleeing their homes in the suburbs or other cities, flattened by ferocious government assaults or overtaken by rebel forces. But even this rock solid sense of solidarity is showing strain as the war drags on and savings run out. And in a deeply divided land, even sympathy is suspect. Families who offer a room to homeless people can get a knock on the door from intelligence agencies. We can't even rent our rooms, moaned one woman. Who needs the extra income. How can we face desperate people who come to us in need? What can we say? Even a proud, defiant government is starting to admit to the scale of this crisis. For months, it rejected recognized terms like displaced people, using euphemisms like mutana kaleen, which just means people who are moving and they are in every direction as soon as they can. It's now feared the refugee exodus into neighbouring countries will soon reach a million. More than 2 million are displaced inside Syria, taking shelter in abandoned buildings, half finished ones, wherever they can find space. But it's painfully hard to find warmth in the coldest winter in two decades. When we visited refugees in a snowbound settlement across the border in Lebanon, Syrian children shivered in pajamas and sandals in freezing temperatures. The UN and other charities are trying to take the politics out of this pain, saying civilians need help no matter what side they're on. Not a day goes by without someone in some capital speaking out about Syrian suffering. Just before Christmas, this year's appeal was launched. About a billion dollars to help Syrian refugees in 2013, about half that amount to help people trapped by the war inside. A UN official in Damascus showed me the figures on their website. How much have foreign governments pledged for this year? I asked. He paused with an emphatic look. Zero. Zero? I queried, incredulous. He showed me the round black line on the page. Would you like to give me a quote on that? I asked, shocked. He replied, any normal person, he said, would expect that by now someone would have promised some money for the terrible start of this year. Governments, agencies may have their reasons for waiting. For Syrian civilians trapped in a vicious spiral of a war of global consequence, it's shocking they aren't getting enough help. But for them it's equally shocking and shameful that they have to seek aid at all.
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And that was Lee's doucet. West African leaders are meeting in Ivory Coast's main city, Abidjan, to discuss how best to coordinate military action in Mali. They're talking about deploying further African troops in support of French and Malian soldiers already in action against Islamist rebels in the north of the country. Latest reports suggest the town of Connor has been taken back from the rebels. Mok Doyle in the capital Bamako, has been observing how the conflict has seen the forging of an unlikely alliance.
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You've got to hand it to the French, they know how to do Africa. A little over a week ago, Islamist insurgents in northern Mali pushed across a line in the sand and took a town in the centre of the country. Within 24 hours, French troops were in Mali, countering the advance. I arrived a few days later. The BBC doesn't move quite so fast, but when I got to Mali, I kept getting my memory jogged by the name of one of the French military units that's now deployed here. The Unicorn Group. The soldiers of Unicorn, or Licorne in French, are based at least two days drive away south of the Malian capital in the city of Abidjan in the Ivory Coast. I was at the French base in Abidjan a few years ago when, operating under a United nations mandate, French soldiers helped arrest a rogue Ivory coast president who had refused to leave power when he had lost an election. When the Ivory coast memory came to me here in Mali, I realized that a quite astonishing military deployment had been achieved in what must have been 12 hours notice, certainly no more than 24. The unicorn group in Abidjan must have assembled a heavily armoured convoy and driven 800 miles or so across West Africa. The French soldiers, some in crisply ironed and rather tight tropical shorts, refueled in the Malian capital. They then drove their war machines, big guns at the ready and headlights blazing for another full day, up to the front line to stop the Islamists from advancing further. Meanwhile, terrifying looking Mirage fighter jets flew in from another French base in Africa, this time in Chad, to bomb the positions of France's new enemy on the continent, the Islamists of northern Mali. No other country could have achieved this military feat in Africa. So is this neo colonialism? Yes, of course it is. But is that necessarily a bad thing? I'm not so sure. And nor, perhaps most surprisingly, is the giant of this West African region, the very proudly independent and robust nation of Nigeria. After the French made their lightning Fast deployment in Mali, West African countries agreed to speed up their own movements to counter the Islamists. And one of the first countries to send soldiers to Mali was Nigeria. That's significant because for generations now, English speaking Nigeria has been trying to assert its dominance over smaller former French colonies that have an annoying habit of cooperating closely with the former colonial master. Whether that means voting with France slavishly at the United nations or giving contracts almost automatically to French companies. The geopolitical competition also went much further. France and Nigeria were on opposite sides in the historic Biafra war when part of Nigeria sought to break away. And more recently, in the 1990s, France and Nigeria backed different proxy forces in the Liberian civil war. The overall commander of the anti Islamist West African troops in Mali that come from countries as diverse as the authoritarian desert state of Chad to the very democratic Ghana, is a sparky and very savvy Nigerian General Shehu Osman Abdulkadir. The first time I called General Abdelkade, who arrived in Mali ahead of his soldiers, he was at lunch with colleagues. Could I come for a chat? I asked. Of course, he said, why not? Please meet me in the hotel restaurant. General Shehu Abdulkadir is a confident man, not afraid of journalists. He batted away my snipes about Nigeria and France being competitors with ease. And then late one night at the airport, some of his Nigerian troops arrived. They didn't have armoured personnel carriers or Mirage fighter jets with them like the French, and they very definitely didn't wear tightly fitting tropical combat shorts. But they jogged out of the tailgate of a giant Nigerian Air Force C130 transport plane in full battle dress, rifles at the ready. Nigeria and France fighting together. Who would have thought it the ground war against the Islamists could be won, it could be lost. It will certainly be long and hard, but history has already been made here in Mali with an unlikely alliance between a major European and a major African power. Remember Mali? A war that may forge a new friendship between France and Nigeria.
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Mark Doyle in the Malian capital Bamako, there was the merest hint of better times ahead in Hungary this week with the news that inflation's down for the first time in months. Much of Eastern Europe's been hit hard by the recession, but Hungary's economy is the weakest in the region. Jobless figures are high and more and more young people are leaving the country looking for work abroad. But the struggle to make ends meet is good news for at least one sector of the economy. The second hand shops as petroch Trelocure. Corney's been finding out in Budapest.
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The contrast between the trains at Budapest's Kellerty station was striking. The sleek, streamlined, red Austrian Express from Vienna with its smart stewardesses. And across the platform, the night train to Bucharest. Travellers with battered suitcases and overflowing bags queued to board the scraped and dented Romanian railway carriages. Tattered curtains hung from some of the windows. Cotton cold neon bulbs brightly illuminating the simple berths. Kellerty is one of Europe's great rail interchanges. Trains from Zurich, Berlin and Munich terminate here. You can journey on to Transylvania and the Balkans. Istanbul is just two nights away for passengers from Austria. The once interminable delays at the border, while passports were checked and bags inspected, are long forgotten. Swept away when Hungary joined the European Union nine years ago. But once again, Budapest has come to represent something of a crossing point between the comparative wealth of northern Europe and the financially strained rest of the continent. In the years immediately before Hungary joined the eu, journalists and commentators flocked here to praise its free market economy. This country, it was said, would lead the way in the journey from communism to capitalism. But it didn't turn out like that. One obvious illustration of Hungary's current position on the economic cycle is the brisk business being done in Budapest's second hand shops. Just around the corner from the vast central market, a small shop sells clothes and shoes, school uniforms, rails of jeans, shelves of board games upstairs, a few scrappy bits of furniture and half a dozen Iranian rugs. The carpets retailing for 18,000 forint and around 60 Euro. Better quality goods can be found in one of the half dozen Bav pawnbrokers. The Bavs, as they're known, have been around for 240 years. Founded under the imperial Empress Maria Theresa and run by the state during the communist years. One branch has a wall filled with Soviet Socialist realist pictures. A nuclear family visiting the site of their new home. Muscular workers at toil in the fields. But even the mighty BAV can't compete with the sprawling etchery flea market. It's half an hour from the centre of town on the 54 bus. The bus stop is on a six lane motorway. Get out by the Citroen garage with the mini Eiffel Tower outside. A friend tells me. Across the bus's aisle sits an old man in scuffed leather jacket and black tracksuit, eating an egg sandwich as his wife looks on. We pass grey residential blocks, rusting factories and a new branch of the British supermarket Tesco. The whole front of the bus seems to know My business here. Here, says the egg sandwich man encouragingly as we pull into the stop. This is you, mister, confirms the friendly driver. Etchery is enormous. Row after row of stalls. It's busiest at the weekend when gypsies from the country arrive with their wares. I am visiting on a Friday. Only a third of the stalls are open, but there's still a vast amount to look at and haggle over. A battered grand piano sits exposed to the elements. A large man with a glass of wine perched on the marble counter next to him solicits an offer for a quartet of ornately carved wooden legs, perhaps once attached to an imperial bed. Dozens of Communist era red telephones sit alongside a selection of cut glass decanters. Pristine dinner services jostle for space next to piles of mismatching and chipped plates, bowls and soup tureens. Pictures, medals and busts of Lenin are a reminder of the Soviet occupation of Hungary. Suddenly the wind catches a dozen chandeliers hanging from the rafters, the gentle tintinnabulation of the glass sending a shiver down my spine. I want a picture to take away with me as a reminder of my visit and eventually settle on a small pastel of a winter's scene, snow thick on the ground. A little haggling. I walk away. A symbolic reduction in price and the picture is mine. It's dated 1942, when Hungary was fighting on the German side in the Second World War. Desperate to warm up, I order stuffed cabbage in the market cafe. Waiting for it to arrive, I tap the name of the painter of my picture into the search engine on my mobile phone. Istvan Holoshi Horvat. The Internet confirms I haven't just secured myself a valuable masterpiece, but it does report that Horwart lived and worked in Budapest, was born in 1904 and only died in 1994. As I work my way through the great steaming dish of mince and greens put in front of me, I consider what Horvath must have seen. Born in the Austro Hungarian Empire, a teenager in the Post World War I chaos, witness to the devastation meted onto his country by both Germans and Russians in the Second War. A Soviet comrade for four decades and for the last years of his life, a free Hungarian citizen once again a tumultuous history now being recycled by the second hand shops of Budapest, Petroch Trelawny in Hungary.
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The amount of wine consumed in France is sinking steadily. Back in the 1970s the average Frenchman some women too could be relied upon to down more than 100 litres a year. Today that figures a more modest 46 litres and dropping steadily. Young people in particular often now see wine as an older person's tipple and therefore, of course, deeply unfashionable. They're far more likely to drink beer, and so are furious that the government's announced it's going to increase the tax on their drink of choice. John Laurenson, one of our correspondents in France, has been investigating how a nation's drinking habits are changing.
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The other night I found myself in the middle of the French countryside with 50 minutes to kill while my children attended a hip hop dance class. A pizza van hummed invitingly in the damp, dark car park. But 50 minutes is a long time to spend over a slice of pizza, even if you chew slowly. So I got back in the car, resolving to find that endangered species of French life life a bistro. There were 200,000 of these in 1960, a mere 35,000 today. In a recent interview, the head of the cafe, bar and nightclub branch of France's main food and hotel owners union complained indignantly, if rather bizarrely, that there are now fewer bars than there are church towers. What is the world coming to, anyhow? One of my sons had told me that despite the unfavourable statistics, there was a cafe not far away. It was kept by an old man and had jigsaw puzzles on the wall. Nobody ever went in, said my son, partly because many people didn't even know it was a cafe because it looked like an ordinary house. Sounds like my kind of place, I thought. But after a while, driving around, asking directions of startled, looking passers by, I saw the glowing red cigar sign of a bar, Tabas, and decided to go in there instead. A youngish blonde bar woman with a piercing in her upper lip greeted me, along with two amiable and a huge boxer dog. That eventually calmed down after the woman and the customers assured him that I wasn't necessarily there to burgle or sexually abuse anyone and might just be out for a drink. So what's it to be? Asked the bar woman. I finally settled on a Kia, a drink I hadn't drunk since the 90s. I reckon the Kia, if you don't know it, is a formerly fashionable drink, usually made of white wine and blackcurrant liqueur, named after Felix Kier, the mayor of the Burgundy city of Dijon, who reinforced invented it after the war. During the occupation, the Germans had drunk all the red wine as well as most of the good white. But Kier, not one to bear a grudge, apparently became a pioneer of the town twinning movement in the late 1940s, early 50s, and invited lots of Germans over. But what was he going to give his esteemed guests to drink? Well, what Burgundy had in colossal amounts was a middling quality white called Bourgogne Aligot, and lots of another local product, Creme de cassis. And so the Kia was born. The next time you drink one, remember it's all the fault of the Germans. I settled down to do a bit of texting. The two amiable customers were drinking beer, says Sans Soissant Catre, probably the most complicated beer name ever and very difficult to pronounce when you've had a few brewed in Alsace. Like most French beer, about a third of the beer drunk in France is French, mostly Cronenberg. The poor, of course, used to drink wine. Peasants would drink litres of the stuff. Each French soldier on active duty in 1914 was given a quarter of a litre of wine a day. In that war, though, France won back Alsace Lorraine and with it, its breweries. And now the French poor, who no longer have to go to war, plough the fields, or for increasing numbers of them, do anything at all, drink beer when they're not drinking Fanta. In northern European countries, wine has always been a middle class drink. It's becoming so in France. The French wine industry is still still the biggest in the world, worth more than ever, in fact, and employs 250,000 people. But that increasingly is thanks to exports. A nice young man dressed like he's just been repairing a road comes in and shakes everybody's hand. The barwoman shouts at her children upstairs to turn the music down and do their homework, then proceeds to tell the road mender that there was a burglary in the village last night and another this morning while the owner was taking a bath. The conversation moves seamlessly on to capital punishment, though only for murderers and child molesters, and only then, if they're caught red handed. The road mender assaise sans vois sante quatre. I finish my increasingly middle class and slightly effeminate keer and head off into the night.
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And that's John Laurenson. The fighting in Mali has seen editors pouring over atlases, wondering where exactly places like Mopti Gow and Connor are and how on earth they can find out what's going on there. Mali is one of the poorest and most remote countries in the world. After independence From France in 1960, it rarely featured in the news here, despite droughts, rebellions, a coup and 23 years of military dictatorship. But now the advance of the Islamist fighters, and more particularly the French response, has propelled this little known corner of the globe into the headlines. And it's prompted our colleague Nick Thorpe to remember his travels there 32 years ago.
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Even by African standards, we were a pretty ragged bunch. My sister Mish and myself, four crazy Frenchmen and Mamadi a Bambura from Mali. Mish and I were hitchhiking from England en route to Dakar in Senegal, where I was supposed to go to university. The Frenchman picked us up in Adrar, an oasis town in the south of Algeria, where we'd been waiting three days for a lift. They were driving clapped out Peugeots across the Sahara to sell. It was October, over 40 degrees Celsius at noon, close to freezing at night. There was no road across the desert. You followed the tracks of other vehicles in the sand. At Bidon Sank, an abandoned supply point, we fed migrating swallows and butterflies with water from the lids of jars. It's only 1200 kilometres from Regan, the last oasis in Algeria, to Gau, the first town in Mali. But the journey took seven days. We had too little food and water, but enough firewood. Often we had to push the cars when they broke down. I remember their raised bonnets in a line, as though the cars were prostrating themselves, worshipping the sun. The nights in the desert were the best. The stars filled the whole sky right down to the horizon, as though we were balanced precariously on the crust of a small planet. Sometimes we drove at night without lights to save the car batteries navigating by the stars. In the first oasis we reached in northern Mali, in the area now under Islamist control, we found people dying of thirst around a dry well. They asked for aspirins. One man had a gaping hole in his groin. The next day, we ate bread rolls for the first time in weeks. I've never tasted anything so delicious. The Tuareg people, whose struggle for a land of their own in the Sahel region is one component of the current conflict, made sudden appearances in our journey. When Fredo inadvertently drove his car over a cliff, we had to abandon it in the desert, several Tuaregs appeared around a sand dune. Their indigo cheshes, long headscarves, were as blue as the snow in an arctic night. When I read of their uprising against the central government last year, I remembered those men as we left them, tall, handsome tribesmen sitting on the upholstered seats of a Peugeot 404 surrounded by desert. When we reached Gao, we went to the best hotel in town, the Atlantide, for a strong drink to celebrate crossing the Sahara. The telegram we sent to our parents took three weeks to arrive. Next day we boarded a river boat bound for Bamako on the River Niger. There were no fears of hostage taking in those days. No freedom fighters or terrorists, no clashes between secular rebels and champions of Islamic law. The only time we saw a truckload of soldiers, we hid my sister under a blanket. As a precaution, we travelled fourth class down the Niger. Sleeping on deck, a small boy sitting near us strummed a guitar made from tin, a stick and string. The moors beside us stripped meat from bones with wicked looking knives. On the deck above, men sat patiently all day long with fishing rods I discovered later were radio aerials. They were listening to the BBC World Service. Each river village seemed to specialize in different goods. I bought a black and white striped blanket with strong scent of goat from a woman who carried a bowl of salted fish in her other hand. Boys swam out and clambered over the sides of our boat, dripping blood from the meat they brought to sell. The river boat stopped at the port of Timbuctoo. I longed to go ashore, but the river was drying up fast and we were afraid of getting stranded. We disembarked in Mopti when the boat could go no further. The call to prayer blended with the joyful sound of the Balafon, a kind of wooden xylophone. The simple austerity of the Grand Mosque, made of mud bricks, seemed in perfect harmony with the bustle of the town. The latest news from Mopti is that the hospital is full of the wounded from the fighting in Connor, just to the north, and that the town is swollen with refugees and that French ground troops are in action. There are still people in southern Algeria, though not many, who remember the death and destruction caused by French nuclear tests near Regan in the early 1960s. But perhaps this time French soldiers will defend the people's right to play music from those who would ban it. In the desert, I knew, to protect themselves from sandstorms, only the men wore veils.
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Nick Thorpe recalling a more peaceful era in the deserts of Mali and bringing this edition to a close. I'll be here again on Thursday and Saturday of next week with more from our own correspondence. I do hope you'll join us. Goodbye.