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From Our Own Correspondent
No More Boat People
00:27:55
Global despatches: in this edition, why hunger is again taking hold in South Sudan - a...
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- [00:00]
Kate Ady
You have downloaded from our own correspondent. This edition is the latest one broadcast on BBC Radio 4. And here to introduce it is Kate Ady.
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Narrator/Presenter
Hello. Today the harvest was good, the rainfall plentiful. So why is a devastating famine on the way in South Sudan? I don't hate you, but we are not the same. Our man comes face to face with a white supremacist leader in the us. Australia stops the boat people setting foot on its shores. But what's the price being paid for this tough immigration policy? And pass me the horse meat, please. We're made to feel part of the family on the wrong side of the tracks in Chile. Aid agencies working in South Sudan are warning that 4 million people there are likely to face critical food shortages next month. Ethnic violence has forced many from their homes and thousands of people have died in the fighting, which began as a political dispute between President Salva Kiir and his former deputy riek machara. Tristan McConnell says all this has disrupted the planting season and livestock has been scattered. But despite the spectre of famine, there's no sign of the conflict being resolved.
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Tristan McConnell
You don't have to go much further than the airport in the capital Juba to see how far South Sudan has fallen in the six months since conflict restarted. There are tanks and an anti aircraft gun at the end of the Runway. Hulking Aleutian 76 and Lockheed C130 cargo planes painted with a logo of the World Food Programme A are parked on the apron in between flights to airlift food to hungry parts of the country. The new terminal, which was supposed to be ready to welcome guests celebrating the nation's independence four years ago, is still not completed and is already beginning to rust. The array of white container buildings that makes up the nearby United nations base has been augmented by a dirty scrum of tents and shelters housing 14,000 Newair people who fled their homes when ethnic Dinka soldiers went on a murderous rampage in December. The trigger for the conflict that's tearing at the seams of the nation was an alleged coup by the former Vice President Riat Machar against his long standing rival, President Salva Kir. The personal political battle quickly spiralled into ethnic conflict and spread. It's been characterized by remarkable brutality, ethnic massacres, rape, the use of child soldiers and scant regard for the rights or protection of civilians. More than a million people have been uprooted and at least 10,000 killed. If Juba tells you what has happened so far, the town of Lehr, a 90 minute flight northwards over the endless swamps of the Sud, shows you what's coming next? I flew to Lehre because there's no drivable road from the south and because although there is one from the north, it involves crossing the twitchy line separating government and rebel soldiers. The first sign something has gone badly wrong are the charred outlines of burned homes visible from the air on the ground. And close up, the scale of the damage is clearer. The circular mud homes with thatched roofs that most families live in are razed to the ground. Livestock is driven away and grain stores looted. Even the fences have been cut down and carried off. During the fighting in late January and February, the entire population fled into nearby swamps. Sitting on a thin mattress outside Leia's partially burned and entirely looted hospital, I met Nhat nien, a slender 17 year old in a threadbare black vest. When the war reached her home, she ran, spending weeks hiding in waist deep water during the day, clutching her nine month old son Thak. As night fell, she ventured onto dry land to sleep. They survived, but barely, eating the roots of water lilies and drinking from the river. Sometimes they got sick, often they had diarrhoea. She was hungry constantly and so was Thack. The boy quickly lost weight and Dr. Dilair told me he was suffering from severe acute malnutrition. He is a wide eyed boy with an old man's face, a beaded bracelet around his skinny wrist. The baseball T shirt he wears is many sizes too big for him, swamping his emaciated body. In just a few months, Thack had gone from being robust and happy to to listless with a rasping cough that makes him cry out. The fighting has subsided for now. With the onset of the rainy season, battle lines are unlikely to shift and so the people of Lair are returning to their destroyed homes. But it's too late to plant crops and in any case, the seeds they might have planted were burned or stolen, so there will be no harvest this year. They are hungry now. Soon they will be starving. International aid agencies are doing what they can, dropping pallets of food from the sky and flying in plane loads of high protein paste that can keep a malnourished child from death. But it isn't and won't be enough. The UN predicts that 50,000 will likely die in the months to come. As famine returns to parts of South Sudan. The number killed in six months of civil war will look insignificant compared to those who will die from lack of food and disease. All famines are man made to a degree, but this one is unusual because there are no climatic reasons at all. Last year's harvest was above average and rainfall has been good. The only reason famine is coming to South Sudan is because of the fighting and the displacement, disruption of markets and destruction it has wrought. And yet the political leaders on both sides show little serious interest in ending the conflict and lessening the suffering of the people they pretend to lead and and ought to serve. Life is seldom easy in South Sudan, but the war they started is making it impossible.
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Narrator/Presenter
And that's Tristan McConnell. Now, Americans are very emotionally attached to the First Amendment to their Constitution. It was adopted in 1791 and guarantees, among other things, the right to freedom of speech. But of course, the right to say whatever you like to whoever you like might not be absolute, particularly if we're talking about sexual expression, disrespect to other people's FAI or backing an enemy during wartime. In this country, using strong language to comment, for example, on matters of race and religion can get you into serious legal trouble. Ali macbool has been travelling around the United States interviewing people about race 50 years after President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights act into law. And he soon realised the importance of First Amendment protections when it comes to which views get expressed and which often don't.
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Ali Macbool
I'd just finished interviewing one of the men who'd helped shape white supremacist thinking in the usa. Mike Halimore is himself leader of three supremacist groups. I couldn't help but ask where I, as someone of Asian origin, stood in his thinking. Well, I don't hate you, he said, just like I didn't hate my dog or my llama. But we're not the same. He went on to explain, using biblical references, how only white people had souls, were inherently intellectually superior and the only ones capable of ruling countries. A rather torturous discussion followed, but his, well, ludicrous theories kept coming. He talked of the slave trade being the only reason, in his words, they weren't still swinging from the trees, but saved his worst vitriol for Jews going into great detail to explain why they were in fact sons of the devil. They ran the US government, he said, and the health system and were somehow systematically destroying his race. The very same views he'd expressed had been uttered in almost the same terms by a killer in nearby Kansas City and was the reason we'd come here. A few weeks earlier, a man called Fraser Glenn Miller, a former so called Grand Dragon in the Ku Klux Klan, had gone to a busy Jewish community center in Kansas and sprayed it with bullets, then went to a Jewish care home and opened fire again. Three people, a grandfather and his 14 year old grandson and a lady who'd been visiting her elderly mother had been left dead in the small town in which he'd lived. The sheriff told us Miller had never hidden his views and had talked about violence against Jews and other groups in the past. But as distasteful as that was, it hadn't warranted arrest. People can say they hate the President, the sheriff told me, but unless they say they're going to kill the President on a certain day, there's nothing we can do. It's freedom of speech. In Harrison, in Arkansas, close by where we'd met Mike Hallimore, the white supremacist leader. No fewer than 13 supremacist groups based, including the Ku Klux Klan. The police again told us they could do nothing about the head of the KKK who lived there because he was a law abiding citizen. At the entrance to the town is a huge sign put up by one supremacist group. It says anti racist is code for anti white. Again, nothing could be done, they said freedom of expression. In fact, a student who came from out of town and defaced the sign, turning it to anti racist is a code word for love and is the one who got arrested and fined over $1,000. In Harrison we even met a race relations group. While they did talk of being unhappy, white supremacist groups had set up in their town. They said freedom of speech was the most important tenet. Who would decide what's offensive and what's not? They said people have to be allowed to express themselves. It was clear the debate over incitement to racial hatred starts from a very different place in America as compared to Europe, KKK rallies still happen. Robes, hoods, the works. Though the numbers of people attending these days are far fewer than they used to be. They held such a rally in Pennsylvania the other day on the site of the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg. Mounted police watched as nine KKK members using loud halos screamed the worst possible insults against black people and Hispanics, Jews and homosexuals. The police, including African American officers, didn't flinch even when the supremacists ranted about a battle to the death, driving minorities into the sea. I spoke to Mark Potok, one of the country's leading experts on white supremacists in America today. He said because of the First Amendment, it's okay even to address tens of thousands of people and say that all Jews in the country should be killed. And that would make it a better place, he said. To actually get arrested, a white supremacist would have to incite someone to commit more specific and immediate violence. Mark Potok says the number of different white supremacist groups in America, currently some 650, has increased since the economic downturn and the election of Barack Obama. And they are now often the ones protected by civil liberties groups. It's hard not to wonder how far America's attachment to its First Amendment, the right to freedom of speech and expression, is allowing hate groups the space to inspire some to to commit murders in the name of their supremacist beliefs.
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Narrator/Presenter
Alim McBool back now at his base in Washington. The Australian authorities are believed to have intercepted a boat carrying more than 150 asylum seekers. They're reportedly planning to send them back home to Sri Lanka. The Australian Prime Minister, speaking on the radio this morning, wouldn't comment, but his government has been reminding people of the promise it made last year to put a stop to would be migrants arriving by sea. No boats have arrived since December last year, according to a spokesman. In the 12 months up to June 2013, 18,000 people arrive by boat. Australia has launched some of the most restrictive measures against people claiming they're fleeing persecution. Judith Crosby's been looking into the problems confronting those seeking a new life down under.
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Judith Crosby
A good, shy, gentle young man who wanted to change the world is how Aaron Milevagenham describes his friend Leo Simon Pillai, who died in May in the southern Australian city of Geelong after dousing himself in petrol and setting himself on fire. As a fellow member of the Tamil community, Aaron got to know Leo 13 months ago when he was released from a detention centre in Darwin. He'd been held there since he arrived in Australia by boat seeking asylum in January last year. He was with Leo when the 29 year old succumbed to his horrific burns and died in hospital. He was unconscious, but we said goodbye, stood in silence and left, said Aaron. Australia's Immigration Minister, Scott Morrison, has warned against drawing conclusions between Leo's actions and his status as an asylum seeker. Like many asylum seekers, he had mental health problems, though he had been heavily involved in the local community and had a job. But in a country where the two biggest political parties try to outdo each other on how tough their asylum policy is, the atmosphere for people in Leo's situation is difficult. The potential for deportation was always on his mind. He had never received anything saying he would be deported, but the threat is always there. Aaron says in some respects, Australia has a very good record in asylum it resettles thousands of people each year from around the world who have been assessed by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and declared in need of protection. If an asylum seeker comes by plane to Australia on a valid student or tourist visa, they have their claims processed then and are generally not detained. But it is the boat arrivals which receive much of the negative attention. Successive governments have insisted their focus is reducing the risk to people who are preyed on by smugglers and who attempt dangerous and lengthy journeys in leaky boats. But as an island nation which has rules for everything, even the angle at which you park your car against the pavement, the idea of having its sovereignty breached by people arriving unannounced by boat touches a nerve. It's as if there are good refugees and bad refugees. The objection to them is not racist, it's the way they come to the country, says Claire Higgins, a research associate at the Kaldor center for International Refugee Law at the University of New South Wales. The policy on boat arrivals has seen Australia do controversial deals with neighbouring countries, Nauru and Papua New guinea to house asylum seekers who arrive by sea, process their claims and resettle them if they get refugee status. Canberra is reported to be concluding a deal with Cambodia to also take in refugees trying to get to Australia. Doubts about the ability of impoverished nations with troubles of their own to accommodate Australia's refugees were highlighted in February this year when riots broke out at a detention centre on Papua New Guinea's remote Manus Island. Protests by asylum seekers living in hot, cramped conditions and frustrated at the fact that they would not be allowed to settle in Australia, resulted in violence after Papua New guinea locals, police and members of the G4S security firm intervened. Reza Barati, a 23 year old Iranian national, died during the unrest, with a government report quoting an eyewitness saying guards had kicked him and a large stone was thrown on his head. But despite the concerns expressed by UNHCR and human rights groups, it's unlikely that the Australian government will change its tough policy anytime soon. Apart from the success of the policy, a recent opinion poll showed more than 70% of people agree with turning the boats back. Almost 60% said asylum seekers should have their claims processed offshore. For Najiba Vazi Fadhost, knowing that her fellow Australians think like this is difficult. She arrived by boat as a 12 year old with her family in 2000 after fleeing the Taliban in Afghanistan. She knows that things would have been very different if they had arrived today. She would not have been given a chance to seek protection in Australia and would never have become an Australian citizen. A rich, developed nation like Australia should take responsibility for desperate asylum seekers, she says, and not just those who can get on the resettlement program or can make it onto a plane with a visa. Not everyone can get access to the UNHCR or can wait for them to come, she tells me, adding, because waiting might mean they will end up dead.
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Narrator/Presenter
Judith Crosby in Sydney the tension between Russia and Western Europe over Ukraine has left many in Central and Eastern Europe feeling increasingly insecure. Many of these places have long memories of being caught up in the political maneuverings of the big powers. The Czechs, for example. They remember how their own multinational state, Czechoslovakia, was torn apart by the Nazis in the 1930s. Today those memories are particularly intense in Jewish neighbourhoods still rebuilding themselves after the Holocaust and the difficult decades of Communist rule which followed. Chris Bowlby's been getting to know the history of one such community. In a cemetery in the Czech city
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Chris Bowlby
of brno, I strolled at first among a place of elegant good order, neat rows of gravestones beneath a canopy of fine trees, and it seemed like the record of a community of stability and steadily growing prosperity. Memorials to Jewish families who helped make brno, or Brun as it was widely known, a textile powerhouse. This place, not far from Vienna, was known in the 19th century as the Austro Hungarian Manchester, and the community prospered in many other professions too. Lawyers, head teachers, intellectuals and actors are buried here. I noticed Kafkas and Schillers among the names. The German speaking world of commerce and culture so influential in Central European history is proudly on display, as is a gift for architecture and design. Heavier 19th century tombstones are mixed with more modern shapes and elegant 20th century lettering. This community relished the opportunities of an economically dynamic new Czechoslovakia created after the First World War. Even in their gravestones, I noticed, was a modernist faith in a future they'd helped to create. Prosperity begun with textiles would, it was assumed, weave together this place's peoples and cultures, despite the unraveling threatened by big power politics all around. But then I stopped strolling, confronted with horrific interruption to that narrative of progress. Gravestones that began conventionally enough with, say, parents names and dates of birth, then switched from ornate lettering to cold, despairing lament. Now no careful recording of date or place of death considered epitaph record of a life fully lived and brought to a proper end. Instead, only the date of when each group of parents, children, grandchildren disappeared into the terrible, anonymous void of deportation and Nazi death camps. Somewhere to the east here, the beautiful trees and intense spring birdsong all around seemed cruelly inappropriate for such a bleak conclusion. That interruption's underlined by change of language too. As the story moves from stability to catastrophe, you no longer see German inscribed but Czech. Did this community feel, I wondered, that their ancestors language had been permanently corrupted? Had German become the unbearable mark of Nazi brutality, no longer the language that recorded this cultured community's successful assimilation? For some time after the war, the Jewish presence in BRNO all but disappeared. The few who survived deportation never felt welcome, especially after the communists took over Czechoslovakia. Many left for Israel. But since the end of communist rule in 1989, the Jewish presence has been reviving. And so has the memory of what previous generations built here with optimism and imagination. At the Villa Tugendhardt in another suburb, I found the revolutionary interwar residence commissioned by a local Jewish couple from the architect Mies van der Rohe. Traditionally, heavy Czech villas still stand around it. But gazing at its luminous expanse of glass and concrete, with rigidly clean lines, free of any decoration, I sen what a stir it must have caused when first built. Its owners had to flee in 1938 as the Nazi threat to Czechoslovakia loomed. But in the last few years, the buildings, reopened after restoration, is now under UNESCO protection and maintained by an impressive young staff well versed in its significance, with plans to expand its educational role and tourist potential. And back at the Jewish cemetery, its buildings also impressively restored, was a tall young attendant eager to please. Gesturing towards tables loaded with publications and information, he told me about a new business, tours organized by his community, highlighting their history. It was such a cheering contrast to other Jewish cemeteries I've seen in the region where exhausted older community members struggled to keep going. Or where, as in Vienna, decades of shameful neglect by the city left the resting place of many of its greatest residents full of collapsing or vandalized tombstones and weed infested plots. But in brno, the newest generations from Jewish and other communities are trying again to make the mingling of peoples in this European crossroads a creative force. In the city center, Ukrainian and Russian students are among those honing their business or language skills in classrooms. Together they know better than anyone that the threat of conflict is never completely buried. It resounds in this city's memory, not only of Nazis and communists, but but in cathedral bells ringing out a reminder every day of the brutal 17th century siege by Protestant Swedes or the major Napoleonic battlefield at Austerlitz nearby. Yet I'll be remembering in a beautiful cemetery not only awful history, but also the spirit of a community that still believes it can honour the past. By creating a successful future.
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Narrator/Presenter
And that's Chris Bowlby in the Czech city of Brno. Now, how about some fine dining for less than £4 on a family sofa? The world has been getting more interested in Latin American food over the past few years. In Britain, that's perhaps best illustrated in the popularity of tacos from Mexico or from Peru. There's ceviche, raw fish marinated in lime juice with a smack of chilli and onion. Further south, down the west coast of the continent, there's more. Bolivia is famous for its quinoa grain. And of course, there's the roasted guinea pigeon. Chile has its own indigenous ways of cooking and draws too, on the combined expertise of waves of immigrants from Spain, Germany and Italy. Ed Stocker's been to meet a man dedicated to reviving all sides of his country's culinary heritage.
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Kate Ady
The end of the road is blocked off. A flea market selling vegetables and cheap clothes is in full swing. There's nothing idle about this bustling Sunday scene in Cerrillos, a neighbourhood just outside the city limits of Santiago, Chile's capital. Cut off from the main drag of the city, sliced by a major thoroughfare and with poor transport connections, Cerrillos is quite literally on the wrong side of the tracks. Although the poverty here isn't extreme, this is a poblacion, the Chilean name for Ashanti town. A place inhabited by the working class, many of them immigrants from the countryside. Cerrillos is not a place you'd associate with gastronomy, a far cry from the well to do eateries of the northern districts. Yet look carefully next to the street vendors in Bric, Iraq, and you'll see an unassuming sign advertising fresh bread and pointing to a small house. Jose Luis Calfoucuda decided to open a restaurant right there in his small, single story home seven years ago. The chef is a Mapuche from Chile's largest indigenous group, a culture often marginalized and misunderstood due to a rumbling land rights conflict in the south of the country. Originally, Jose Luis only sold empanadas, meat, pasties and bread. Tutored by his mother, Juanita, they eventually branched out into pastel de choclo, a corn and minced beef Chilean staple, which went down well with the neighbours. Buoyed by the success, Jose Luis decided to open a full scale eatery, but only open on Sunday lunch times. There's a covered but open fronted eating area full of wooden tables. The walls and ceiling are cluttered with everything from wooden wine boxes and wicker baskets to colourful pictures. Sunlight dances on the white tablecloths. The place is packed, and Jose Luis is holed up in a small kitchen space. A woman said to me recently, why don't you take your restaurant to the north? He says as he negotiates several frying pans on the hob in front of him. But why would I want to do that? Dressed in an apron, with white thick rimmed glasses and long hair tied back in a ponytail, Jose Luis is every inch the avant garde chef. His aim isn't making money, he says. Sunday's earnings go to his mother, but rather educating people about the all but lost art of mapulche cooking. Chileans always want to show the pretty side of life, the chef says, handing me a cube of raw horsemeat dusted with marquen and mapuche smoked chili. But this here is real. Being a guest here is an intimate invitation into the chef's home, which he still shares with his parents and younger brother. While Jose Luis is sweating away in the kitchen, his mother is out back kneading the dough for the empanadas and his father is tending to the clay oven out in front. Later, Cal Fukura senior happily dozes on a sofa in front of a flat screen TV in the living room while the waiters sneak quick glances at the football match. It's showing. The dishes leaving the kitchen are hearty, to say the least. Jose Luis likes to use cheap cuts, but in innovative ways. Horse liver is served with two purees, chickpea and pea, and fried vegetables. Or there are chicken feet, not to everyone's taste, perhaps, and giant stuffed courgettes. Because overheads are small, Jose Luis is able to sell dishes for 3,000 pesos, or 3 lbs. 20 pence, making the restaurant much more affordable. Interest in his cooking has spread through word of mouth, drawing in punters and food critics from wealthier neighborhoods. It's dark by the time the last guests have left and the washing up is done. The family finally gets to sit down and eat, and I'm invited to join them around a dimly lit table in a now silent and empty space. In the Mapuche language, we don't say I eat bread, jose Luis explains. Instead we say I want to be part of the bread. It's this idea of connecting with nature that is so important to his people, he adds. He says his food is Mapuche, in essence, due to a strong relationship with the land. Earlier, Jose Luis had taken me out behind his house to a dusty orchard next to the community's football pitch. Here he grows everything from the Ricarica herb and tomatoes to pink edible flowers all incorporated into the dishes. Before I leave, the chef produces a vat of alcohol, a homemade spirit of toasted wheat and orange skin with a sharp kick for a final toast before insisting on driving me to the nearest Metro station. I really felt part of the family.
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Narrator/Presenter
Ed Stocker in chili and lunching on chilies with a cube of horse meat on the side. We'll have more delicacies for you on Saturday. Until then, goodbye.