← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
No Safe Refuge
00:28:02
Gabriel Gatehouse talks to a once-loyal Alawite pilot who ran foul of Syrian and was...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent.
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You can hear the version of the
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programme we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our site at BBConline. But here's the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today, the loyal Air Force pilot who ran foul of Syrian intelligence officers and the Syrian refugees in Jordan desperate to return to the war zone back home. Rivers of blood in Moscow, a new map marking the homes of Stalin's victims. Also, the rumour mill goes into overdrive in Libya. And we hear about the Californians who cough up for presidential campaigns and can't wait for the elections to be over. Fighting in Syria has intensified, with government planes bombarding opposition strongholds around Damascus, in Aleppo and in the north and east of the country, a ceasefire last week, timed to coincide with the Muslim feast of Eid, was a failure, with more than 500 people killed during the four day holiday. China has a new proposal for a political resolution. But few are optimistic about ending this crisis. Meanwhile, those who can continue to flee the violence, people from all walks of life, are leaving for all sorts of reasons. Gabriel Gatehouse met one man who escaped to Jordan.
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Othman Mohammed stretches his skinny arms out on either side as far as they'll go. The 50 year old pilot had shared a cell with 12 other people. He remembers the space well, two metres long and narrow enough to flatten both palms against opposite walls. Othman Mohammed is not his real name. We're sitting at a pavement falafel stall in a town near the Syrian border. A month earlier, he and his family had risked their lives crossing the frontier into Jordan. Mr. Mohammed is a meticulous man. Each time he recalls a measurement, a date or a time, he notes it down for me on a piece of paper. I couldn't lie down, he says. I took off my shoes and my overalls, I rolled them up and I sat on them. Othman's job in the Syrian Air Force paid well. He was an establishment figure, not a high flyer, metaphorically speaking, but comfortably off. Under the Assad regime, all of that changed on the 9th of July, 14:29 hours local time. Offmann scribbles. An airplane crashes on take off. I was at my desk, he remembers. I got news that a plane had gone down in smoke. Othman drove straight to the crash site. The plane's fuselage had snapped in two. No one was killed, but the pilot was injured. He examined the contents of the wreckage. There were 16 bombs, he said, in each weighing 250kg. There were 64 boxes of ammunition and three coffins containing one dead body each. Hoffmann scribbles a calculation on his piece of paper. The load was too great for that type of aircraft, he explains, and the pilot had been flying too many hours. He'd asked to be taken off duty, but his request had been refused. The pilot in question was a member of President Assad's Alawite section. The reason he'd been so overworked, Othman said, was that his background made him trustworthy for sensitive missions, like delivering ammunition to government forces and returning the bodies of regime loyalists killed in battle for burial in their hometowns. The day after the crash, intelligence officers arrived to investigate. The atmosphere turned from mistrust to paranoia. Let me explain their mentality, says Othman. When they suspect something, when they're waiting for something to happen and it doesn't, sometimes they create the incident themselves. The intelligence agents suddenly announced that they discovered three crudely made bombs hidden on board other aircraft parked in a hangar. Mr. Mohammed is convinced that the bombs were planted by the intelligence officials themselves, their discovery used as an excuse to detain and question those they suspected of disloyalty to the regime. Sure enough, 30 airport employees were arrested, Uthman amongst them. None of them were Alawite. All was Sunni. Mr. Mohammed was held for 60 days. As he tells his story, he picks away at a mangled fingernail. Was he tortured? I ask. He wasn't, but others were. In his case, the problem is lack of exposure to sunlight. After a while, the fingernails begin to fall off. Of their own accord, the interrogators had only two who placed the explosives on board the aeroplanes. And was the crash an act of sabotage? After a while, the interrogations stopped, but the cramped conditions and the atrocious food continued. Breakfast was half an egg. Lunch for 13 men wouldn't have satisfied two. The water was clear, but so strongly chlorinated it dehydrated him rather than quenching his thirst. During his time inside, Othman was only allowed to shower twice. Sometimes he could hear the voices of women and children from inside his cell, the families of men who'd fallen under suspicion, or worse, defected. After two months, Othman was released. No explanation was given. He was simply expected to return to his job at the airport. But he had other plans. The day I got out, he said, I decided I'd leave Syria. I knew death would be easier than prison. Osman hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take him to his home. One ignored him completely and drove straight past A second told him, you can't go there. There's fighting going on in that neighbourhood. Eventually, with the help of some relatives, he found his wife and children living in a camp for Palestinian refugees. They no longer had a home of their own. It had been burnt down. The clandestine journey across the border was both frightening and dangerous. His nine year old daughter, Aya took a sniper's bullet in the back. After treatment at a Jordanian hospital, she's now back on her feet. But for Othman and his family to return would be far more dangerous. Still, an indeterminate period of exile awaits them. And whoever eventually wins this war, their life of comfortable privilege is gone.
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Gabriel Gatehouse While the pilot he met may be grateful to the Jordanian authorities, some Syrian refugees in Jordan are feeling trapped and frustrated. Nearly 40,000 have taken shelter in the United nations run Zaatari camp close to the border in northern Jordan, where they endured desert sandstorms and a lack of water and sanitation. The camp is close to overflowing, and the UN says it will open a new facility east of Zaka, the country's second city, next month. But although Syrian refugees are still arriving at the Zaatari camp, surprisingly dozens are choosing to leave the safety of Jordan and make the perilous journey back into the war zone. Sakha Al Maqdi has been to investigate.
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The sun is setting on Zaatari as a mother pleads with a soldier to be allowed onto a bus around her. Dozens of Syrians say their farewells as the engine starts up. While an estimated 340,000 Syrians have fled their homeland, this busload is making the opposite journey. We face a slow death here or a fast death over there, says Hussein Aish, pointing towards the border at the other end of the scrubland. As we talk, a low flying Jordanian military jet and a fleet of helicopters circle overhead. Truck after truck, most carrying drinking water, files past the Jordanian army tank and along the muddy road at the heart of the camp. Kids chase each vehicle and scrabble to ride up on the back of it. Hide your car well, says Bilal, a police officer. They have no respect. They'll throw stones at you, he warns, and make sure you're back before dark. This place of refuge has become the setting for an increasingly ugly battle between Syrian refugees and their Jordanian hosts. Demonstrations inside the camp have on at least one occasion turned violent, prompting an exodus back into Syria. Like many of Zaatari's inhabitants, the Hoshan family comes from Dera, the birthplace of the Syrian revolution, just over the border from here. I'M sitting at the entrance to their tent. The canvas is a dirty yellow and they've scribbled their name on the outside in marker pen. They've built a breeze block barrier around the entrance in a futile attempt to keep the sand out, but it's no use. It gets everywhere on the grey mattresses that line the edges of the tent, in the blankets, in the water, in the food. This is my second visit to their temporary home. This the mood is a lot more grim than last time. Remember my son? Asks Sad Hoshan. He's in hospital now. The food, this dirty food, he says as his cousin Ali opens one of the brown ration boxes to show me a rotten egg that he claims was this morning's breakfast. Even camels don't live on this land. They're treating us worse than animals. At this point, a Jordanian charity worker hears the commotion and ducks down, peering into the tent. I hope you're not saying anything against the Kingdom, are you? He asks. The conversation turns into an argument with the Jordanian accusing the Hoshans of lying. The Jordanian government insists the refugees basic needs are met and claims that supporters of the Syrian regime have infiltrated the camp to cause trouble. One high placed official tells me Shabiha, the Syrian paramilitary thugs, have been planted among the refugees to feed information back to the regime in Damascus. The authorities have laid fresh gravel on the main track through the camp and as we walk along here dodging the trucks, Ali and his brother Mohsen show me a burnt out porter cabin. This happened last week, ali tells me. They closed the main road, sent in 300 police and tear gassed us. Ali says it started out as a peaceful demonstration. After two days of what he claims was inedible food and a lack of clean water, UNICEF insists it checks the water twice a day. There is open hostility on both sides. Police and soldiers patrol the perimeter to make sure no one gets in and no one leaves. We're living in a prison, saeed Hoshan tells me. It's like we're prisoners of the Jordanians. It's as if they're working with the Syrian regime. Zaatari is essentially an internment camp built to house Syrians who have crossed the border illegally. But many of them fled the war zone with the help of the Free Syrian army and were picked up by the Jordanian forces who've been coordinating with the rebels. When the conflict first broke out, Syrians who can enter Jordan without a visa were housed in the cities and cared for by the government. But as the trickle turned into a flood, the Zaatari tent city was erected in the desert and opened in July. The Jordanian government estimates the country is now home to 200,000 refugees, 15% of them here in the camp. As night falls over Zaatari, my phone rings. The authorities are telling me that I should have already left the camp. I'm at risk, they insist. A small crowd has gathered near the blue toilet block plastered with UNICEF logos. They're chanting against Bashar rather than their Jordanian hosts. Tonight, Ali links arms with me and walks me to the gate where the soldiers are waiting for me. I'm surviving on juice and biscuits, he says. Take me out with you. A soldier orders him back inside. Like most of the other refugees I talk to, escape from Zaatari is the only thing on Ali's mind.
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Sakur Al Makadee in Jordan there's been feverish speculation in the last few days before the US election about shifting allegiances in Ohio and Florida and all the other so called swing states. But the candidates have also lavished their attention on another crucial part of California. Barack Obama and his Republican rival Mitt Romney have not been going there to hold rallies or canvass for votes. For the last 20 years at least, California has been solidly Democrat when it comes to choosing a president. Their visits are all about raising money, millions of dollars at a time, from what is arguably the largest concentration of wealthy people in the country. But as David Willis reports from the car clogged City of Angels, both presidential candidates have been so much in evidence that familiarity may now be in danger of breeding contempt.
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Asked his view of Los Angeles, the one time silent movie star Will Rogers famously replied, it's a great place to live, but I. I wouldn't want to visit there. Rogers actually went on to make Beverly Hills his home. He was the city's first mayor. But were he alive today, the former vaudevillian might be surprised not only by how popular LA has become with visitors in general, but how it's captured the imagination of one elite group of tourists in particular. If there's one thing you need in order to run a political campaign in America, it it's money. Lots of money. For all President Obama's success in wooing small donors during the 2008 campaign, spending in this election has so eclipsed that of any previous presidential campaign that he's needed the support of wealthy people just as much as his rival Mitt Romney. And nowhere in America is there a greater concentration of wealthy folks than here in California. Between them, Hollywood and Silicon Valley are what the so called 1% calls home. Such folks not only have plenty to give, but they give generously, particularly so at election time. $25,000 a person, for example, at an Obama fundraising dinner in downtown LA a few weeks ago. Since the start of the year, California's movie stars and Internet boffins have donated around $70 million to the President's re. That's more than the contributions of 41 other states combined, incidentally, along with $33 million to the Romney campaign. Criticism of his rival's background in the financial services industry is said to have cost Obama donations from Wall street, which has only served to make fundraising here all the more important. Yet whilst the president and his party remain popular here, not since 1988, when it preferred George Bush Sr. Over Michael Dukakis, has California gone Republican in a presidential race. The one thing people in this sprawling, freeway laced corner of the world really care about is their daily commute. In California, the car is king, and given that its population spends so much of its time behind the wheel, it is perhaps hardly surprising that they tend to get peevish when things get in their way. To put it another way, traffic makes their blood boil, which has made the timing of some of the President's fundraising visits a little, well, unfortunate to say the least. He dropped by again last week, this time for an appearance on a popular TV talk show, and once again Air Force One touched down shortly after 4 o' clock in the afternoon, bringing traffic in parts of the city to a standstill, slap bang in the middle of the evening rush hour. By now you're probably thinking to yourself, those poor Californians there they are, tanned and affluent and having to put up with the occasional delay on the way to their tantric yoga classes or their hyperbaric oxygen therapy sessions or whatever New Age fad they've incorporated into their louche poison harm fringe lifestyle. Why should I feel the slightest bit sorry for them? But the fact of the matter is that Los Angeles has some of the worst traffic congestion in America. Research suggests that every year the average motorist spends the equivalent of three days in their car going absolutely nowhere. Commenting on an article on the Los Angeles Times website about the latest presidential visit, one reader said summed up the concerns of many when he Mr. President, I elected you to be in the White House, not on the 405 freeway. There are times other than the rush hour during which you can visit la. Although no fan of the federal government, Will Rogers, the man who said Los Angeles was a great place to live but he wouldn't want to visit there would probably have welcomed the President's repeated visits, being the staunch democrat that he was. When Rogers lived here. In the early 1900s, La boasted the largest urban rail network in the world. Today, by comparison, the only viable transport network is the city's freeway system. And whether they like the President or not, many of those who use it simply can't wait until this election is over.
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David Willis on Freeway Fury In LA this week, the people of Moscow have been remembering one of the darkest times in their country's long blood stained history. 75 years ago, Joseph Stalin's feared NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, started the great Purge of the Soviet Union's elite. As part of the commemorations, the name of every murdered person from Moscow was read out in front of the old KGB headquarters, the grim Lubyanka building in the centre of the capital. A new interactive database was also created. It's a map of Moscow showing the homes of all the victims. A sea of tens of thousands of blood red dots. And it allows Muscovites to search the list of the dead by street address. Our Moscow correspondent Daniel Sanford has just made an uncomfortable discovery.
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As the long bright days of Moscow's hot summer drew to a close this year, my family and I moved out of our much loved late 19th century flat. We moved across the city for boring practical reasons. To be closer to my wife's new office. We left our beautiful old home with heavy hearts. Like many Moscow apartments, it did not look much from the outside. A heavy grey steel security door, a scruffy communal entrance hall, a grand old staircase with a cast iron banister spoiled by multiple layers of shiny off blue institutional paint. But stepping through the front door took you into another world. High ceilings, big bright windows and a sense of history. A third floor home that would not look out of place in Paris. It was in that kitchen that my artistic four year old daughter learned to paint. It was in that long corridor that her twin brother learned to take corners on his scooter at high speed. We all remember the place fondly, like thousands of people in Moscow. I was curious this week to see if my home was on the newly published commemorative database. As my new flat was built after Stalin's purges, I searched under my old address. Lyalin Pereulok or ljalin Lane is a gently curving street barely 500 metres long. Most of the buildings are low rise and and well over a hundred years old. I found that on this lane alone 25 people were taken away to be shot. Most of them in the bloodiest years of 1937 and 1938. In my flat, flat seven, at number nine lived two brothers. Olympie Kvitkin was killed in 1937 and his younger brother Aristag in 1939. It turns out that Olympie Kvitkin was a rather important person. Born into an aristocratic and military family, he became a lifelong socialist and revolutionary. After studying mathematics at the Sorbonne University in Paris, he became one of Stalin's leading statisticians. He was the man in charge of the 1937 census, an ambitious attempt to count everyone in the Soviet Union. That was where his troubles began, because Stalin had announced in 1934 that the population was 168 million and growing fast. But when the returns came in from the 1937 census, it was clear that the population was just 162 million, 6 million fewer than Stalin had announced just three years earlier. It didn't mean Stalin was wrong, though he might have been out of date. It meant that the sheer unimaginable scale of the millions of deaths from the man made famines of the 1930s was starting to show up in the official statistics. By far the largest numbers died in Ukraine in what is known as the Holodomor, the extermination by hunger. The results of Olympic Witkin census were simply unpublishable. Within days of the first still secret findings being delivered to the Kremlin, he and three senior colleagues were arrested. The Bolshevik journal claimed a serpent's nest of traitors in the apparatus of Soviet statistics had been crushed. Pravda said the men had exerted themselves to diminish the numbers of the population of the ussr, though the diminishing was in fact the fault of Joseph Stalin's brutal policies. Olimpi Kvitkin was shot on 28th September 1937 and buried in a mass grave in the beautiful red brick Donskoi cemetery in Moscow. The importance of his census was only recognized when it emerged from the Secret Soviet Archives 52 years later, in 1989. There is a postscript to this bloody tale. Despite the ghosts of the kvitkin brothers and 23 others, Lyanperulok is still a favored street for Moscow's elite. Sometimes, as I took my children to nursery school, I would see the security men of a Russian member of parliament. He was Andrei Lugovoy, the former KGB man wanted by British police for killing Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 with the lethally radioactive chemical polonium210. One day, when interviewing him, I mentioned that I'D seen him on my street. What number do you live at? He asked. Number nine, I said. Ah, he said. I live at number seven in Moscow. You never can escape from history.
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Daniel Sanford it's been a year since the end of the war in Libya that toppled and killed Colonel Gaddafi. Yesterday, the General National Congress approved the new government led by Prime Minister Ali Zidane. The vote comes a day after protesters, unhappy at the makeup of the proposed cabinet, disrupted proceedings. Reining in the different militia and trying to integrate them into a single national army will be one of the biggest challenges for any new government. But the new leadership faces another headache the seemingly endless whirlwind of rumours driving news agendas. Our correspondent Rana Jawad has been trying to make sense of it all.
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Many months ago, a colleague of mine told me, I find Libya to be the hardest place to verify information. I nodded with a sympathetic look and felt sorry for myself, thinking of the days I'd wasted trying to verify things that were just not true. Information was so tightly controlled in the past that you would sometimes wish an army of ants would invade your house. At least that was an event, and one you could verify with your own eyes. We were desperate for news. Not so anymore. So far this year, one of Muammar Gaddafi's sons, Sayf al Islam Gaddafi, has escaped from custody at least once, according to Facebook. That is, and there are several other examples of reports on many news outlets about the extradition or capture of former regime figures months before they actually happened. Earlier this year, a supposedly official document circulated on social networking sites outlining the new minimum wage. Libyans rejoiced, and the pending pay rise quickly became a hot topic of conversation on the streets and in local media. The visions of red hot Ferraris, speedboats and holidays in Saint Tropez were soon shattered. The document was a fake. The former regime under Colonel Gaddafi established and fed the rumor mill. It was used to test the public's loyalty or patience, and it provided useful propaganda. For instance, one infamous report said that Gaddafi's adopted daughter, Hannah, was was killed in a US airstrike in the 80s. She magically reappeared after last year's uprising, though some had always privately claimed she was alive all along, the rumor mill has outlived Gaddafi. To take just one recent example, many news outlets reported the capture of the former regime spokesman Moussa Ibrahim. The prime minister's office unequivocally confirmed it, and news wires published the story. There was a virtual parade of joy on Twitter and Facebook, and even a public gathering on the streets of Tripoli, complete with celebratory gunfire. But after hours on the phone, I still had my doubts. I reported the story, but stressed the fact that I had gotten numerous contradictory statements from officials, some of which flat out denied it. As news programs analyzed the latest turn of events, Musa Ibrahim strangely appeared to be updating his Facebook page. He released a statement and audio recording denying he had been captured. Eventually, the Prime Minister's office backed down, and Musa Ibrahim is still at large. That wasn't even the only false report that day, because at the same time, media were also reporting the capture and death of Colonel Gaddafi's youngest son, Hamis Gaddafi. He is the son who had been captured and killed three times already this year alone, though he reportedly died during the war last year when his convoy was hit by NATO. After the report spread, the spokesman of the Congress confirmed it too. I dismissed the latest news out of hand. Even when we spoke to a man who described himself as a member of a union of rebels in the city of Masrata, he claimed Hamis Gaddafi's body was right in front of him in the city's hospital. Can you take a picture of it and send it to us? We asked. I can't see it yet, he said. There's a big crowd here. Needless to say, we didn't hear from him again. You would think that all of these rumors would make Libyans cautious about what they say in public. But there appears to be a lack of understanding amongst Libyan officials, police, and even civilian witnesses about the weight their statements carry on big news events. The other glaring oddity is that Libya's newly established private media often report things they see on social networking sites as facts. Officials then find themselves debunking statements they never made. As I write this, the rumor mill continues to turn. At least most are now convinced that Musa Ibrahim was never captured. But most still question reports on Hamis Gaddafi. Some are convinced that he was indeed captured and killed. The latest rumors that his limbs were cut off and authorities are trying desperately to sew them back on so that human rights organizations won't notice. Of course, there is a lot happening in Libya these days. There is always a possibility that a rumor might be true. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of death have been greatly exaggerated.
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Rana Jawad in Libya, trying to untangle fact from friction and bringing us to the end of this edition.