← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Nov 26, 2011
00:28:03
'But of course there will be violence,' says one seasoned observer to Andrew Harding a...
Loading summary
Transcript16 lines
- [00:00]
A
This is the from our own correspondent office at Bush House in London.
- [00:04]
B
Hello.
- [00:05]
A
Here's our latest downloaded programme.
- [00:08]
C
It was broadcast on BBC Radio 4
- [00:10]
A
and introduced by Kate Ady.
- [00:13]
D
A room with a view of history. Today, a Cairo mother and her family look on as the continuing drama of Tahrir Square unfolds outside their window. It's a happy time for pickpockets in Congo as we sample election fever during a power cut. The days of utopia and blood are long gone. In Cambodia today, the preoccupations are getting on, making money. And it's ice cream followed by more ice cream as we wait for revolution to arrive in Damascus. There have been sporadic clashes in the Egyptian capital Cairo, between police and protesters demanding an end to military rule. One person died earlier this morning when a military vehicle ran over a demonstrator. The protesters who've been occupying the main square in Cairo were trying to block an entrance to a government building to prevent the new Prime Minister, Kamal ghanzouri, gaining access. Mr. Ganzouri, who was appointed by the military on Thursday, promised to form an all inclusive cabinet to serve the people of Egypt. Lise Doucet's in the city centre, watching events unfold.
- [01:19]
E
Manal sits in her chair most of the day, much of the night. It's a big stuffed chair covered in crushed velvet patterned with flowers. She's a big Egyptian woman in a flowing robe and a headscarf that frames a round kind face from her chairman, looks across her bedroom through open balcony doors and if she tires of looking there, she shifts her gaze to a little television set. But she doesn't need to watch TV these days. Manal has a window on what the world is watching now Tahrir Square. From her apartment above this now famous space, she hears it all. Running battles between police and protesters, ambulance sirens wailing long into the night. Sometimes tear casts fired by police is so strong it wafts through her windows. Doesn't it keep her awake? Manal smiles sweetly, eyes crinkling behind wire rimmed glasses. I can't sleep, she says, for worrying about these young people in the square. I need to know they are safe. And what about the sons of this widowed mother? 14 year old ishmat listens shyly, clutching his schoolbooks. He's only allowed to go down the five flights of stairs to visit the field hospital right at their door. Hundreds of protesters are treated there every day. Manal's older son, Ahmed, has more freedom. He crosses the square to meet his tutor on the other side and then crosses back to come Home does Manal worry. Ahmet, she says, bids her goodbye with an expression often used by pious Muslims. If I have life before me, I will return. In other words, life is in God's hands. Ahmet sees at Tahrir Square his mother can't see from on high on the ground, it's in constant flux, becoming a city within the city. Young men and women form a human cordon, checking all who enter inside. Volunteers clean the streets. Doctors in white coats treat the injured, and enterprising street vendors turn a profit. When hundreds of thousands of Egyptians recently converged on the square, there were flags and trinkets of the revolution for sale. Red toffee apples, pink cotton candy. Now you can buy everything from roasted sweet potatoes and salted nuts, sunglasses and socks, and now even gas masks. It can feel like a carnival at moments, but this week it's been a confrontation. At night, from Manal's balcony, it's a seething human canvas, a carpet of yellow and white light threaded with flashing blue ambulance signals. You see crowds surging towards police and army lines and running back to escape the tear gas. Human chains out slogans like erhal, Erhal, Leave, leave. That's what they chanted when they first took over the square in January and called on President Mubarak to go. He did. After 18 days of unprecedented protest, now they're back in this square, using the same slogans to demand that the real power in the land, military chief Field Marshal Tantawi, must go. And this time, activists say they're not leaving Tahrir, not until all their demands are met. Many well known activists traipsed up the five flights of stairs to Manal's balcony this week. They looked across Tahrir with palpable awe and anger. Awe that the square was throbbing and thriving again. Anger at how many people have been killed and injured by security forces. Tahrir has found its voice again, and Egypt's military feels it has to listen, but only to a point. Outside the square, in the crowded streets of Cairo, I met many Egyptians who thought Tahrir's time was gone, who believed the army was doing what it could to move Egypt towards democracy, including calling elections set to start on Monday. And when we visited villages along the Nile, we found the tumult of Tahrir had not completely escaped them. But life, with all of its growing hardship, still has to go on. For Egyptians like Manal. Tahrir has taken over her life, disrupted by a tide of people, including journalists like us, with whom she's kindly agreed to share her view. For now, she watches serenely from her chair, unable to say when and how it will end. No one can now, not even those in the real front rows of history.
- [05:37]
D
And that's Lise Doucet. On the final day of campaigning for elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The main candidates are inviting thousands of supporters to attend mass rallies. UN peacekeepers in helicopters are helping to distribute ballot papers to remote locations. But the airlift has been hit by bad weather. Andrew Harding's been watching the campaigning in Congo, a land where most people live on less than a dollar a day, despite the country's huge reserves of cobalt, copper, diamonds and gold.
- [06:10]
A
So which eruption have you come to see? Asked the border guard. The volcano or. Or the elections? We were crossing into the Democratic Republic of Congo from tiny, orderly Rwanda. These days it's the musical equivalent of switching from a Strauss waltz to Iron Maiden. It took us a mere 9 hours to complete the necessary bureaucracy at the border. Congo barely exists as a functioning state, but its appetite for red tape is keen and unquenchable. It's nine years since I first came to Goma. The volcano behind the town had just erupted, and a slow river of lava was eating its way through the central business district and heading towards the lake. Today, Goma has rebuilt itself in a ramshackle way around, and on top of the hardened lava, it's a dirty, bad tempered, mesmerizing place. If you were to gather up all the cliches about Africa, the beauty, the wildlife, the misery, the dynamism, the vast mineral wealth, the endless brutality, scrunch them into a ball and drop them into the middle of the continent, you'd get something close to this contrary little town. It's late afternoon, and a noisy, crowded pleasure cruiser drifts past our hotel on the shores of Lake Kivu. Tall crested cranes peck at the lawn. In a villa two blocks away, a warlord indicted by the International Criminal Court is living freely, guarded by what amounts to his own private army. Nearby, boys push giant homemade wooden bicycles loaded with water cans along rutted streets. Adventurous backpackers trickle across the border to Rwanda after a visit to a brand new volcanic eruption to the north of town. And in the forests and hills around Goma, a wretched cast of militia gangs, rebel leaders and army factions, the remnants of Congo's long wars, continue to wrestle for power. Speaking of which, it's election time in Congo, only the second since the wars officially ended. Some 19,000 candidates are running for office, including a notorious militia leader who is wanted for his alleged part in the gang rape last year of at least 387 women, men and children. The Congolese army is currently protecting rather than arresting him. One evening I head into the pitch power cut black center of Goma in the hope of catching a glimpse of a presidential candidate campaigning in town. There is a frenzy on the dark streets, crowds surging towards the blare and roar of a slow procession of cars. Even the pickpockets are grinning as I pull one hand, then another from my pockets. The candidate, a local favourite named Vital Kamere, is trying, not unlike a professional surfer, to cling onto a chair on the back of a pickup truck that's pitching and swaying violently as it navigates the lava lined roads. He passes us and the crowd roars with delight. But to me their loyalty seems dangerously ferocious. In a balkanized country still uncomfortably preoccupied with ethnicity, this election feels more like an ordeal to be survived than a chance for Africa's wounded giant to get back on its feet. Six Kalashnikovs, some mortars and some rocket propelled grenades. It's the next afternoon and I'm down by the lakeside in the gardens of an elegant villa. A tribal chief has just arrived from the mountains west of Lake Kivu and is nervously claiming that Mr. Kamare, the surfing presidential candidate, has been doling out weapons to his supporters. Our host chuckles and tuts. Bzima Karaha is a Machiavellian figure in Congolese politics, a power broker and puppeteer, seldom far from the action and quietly feared by many in the region. Bezema is no 1, he insists, just a businessman these days. You can write that down, he adds. The chief leaves and Bzima orders dinner for the two of us. We talk about the past, the invasion from Rwanda after its genocide, which helped to overthrow Congo's dictator, Mobutu Sese Seiko, the next president, Laurent Kabila, killed by his bodyguard and now his son Joseph, who took over. Bezema is sure Joseph Kabila will win re election, if only because the opposition is divided and there's just one round of voting. But of course there will be violence, he says, helping himself to a plate of beef stew. The lights flicker. Another power cut. We are like the Balkans here, says Bezema. But the seeds of democracy have been planted. He compares Congo to Ivory coast, where a recent disputed election briefly reignited civil war. The difference here, he says, is that the incumbent will win, the losers will try to create chaos, but it won't last. Bezema will not let that happen.
- [11:19]
D
Andrew Harding the tiny former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia has A chilling statistic from its past. It's the country which lost the largest proportion of its Jewish population during the Second World war. More than 7,000 Macedonian Jews were sent to their death in concentration camps. Almost the entire community was wiped out. Now the government in Skopje has opened a Holocaust memorial center in the capital, the fourth such museum in the world. Mark Loewen's grandmother managed to survive the war years, and he's just been to Macedonia to meet another woman who escaped the fate that befell so many of the country's Jews.
- [11:59]
F
She leafs slowly through the aging photographs, her finger tracing the outline of her family members. My mother, Estef, my father, Isaac. She begins moving through them slowly. Then my brothers and sisters, she goes on, naming all 18 of her relatives killed in the Holocaust. I was the only one not taken. I didn't even say goodbye to them, she muses, grappling with the memories. Jamila Kolonomos is one of the few Jews still remaining in Macedonia, a country that lost 98 per cent of its Jewish population, the highest proportion anywhere in the world. I stopped off at her house in Skopje on the way to the city's new Holocaust Museum. At 89 years old, she is one of the few who remembers the deportation of the Macedonian Jews sent by the occupying Bulgarian forces to Treblinka concentration camp in Poland. Jamila only survived by hiding in Macedonia and then joining Tito's partisan resistance. As she casts her mind back, her kindly eyes suddenly narrow. A look of sheer anger fills her elderly face. I can't forget the screams as the soldiers arrived, she says, almost shouting. I still dream about them. And now when I laugh, something aches in my heart as the cold, cramped trains filled with deportees wound their way from the Balkans, through Central Europe and up into Poland. Poland. They may even have passed another camp on the way. Kwasov, just outside the city of Krakow, since immortalized in the film Schindler's List. It was there that my grandmother, Natalia Karp, was taken in 1943. She was a young, beautiful concert pianist from Krakow, trying to escape into the mountains with her sister when she was seized. The two women were sent to Piov, destined to be killed. But the camp commander, Amon Goethe, played in the film by Ralph Fiennes, had one soft spot in an otherwise brutal character. He was a music lover, and the night my grandmother arrived was his birthday. An order was sent out for the young virtuoso Polish pianist to play at his party. She told me years later how revolted she was by Goethe, dressed In his white uniform and surrounded by beautiful women. She hadn't played for four years. Whilst in hiding, the commander suddenly turned to her. Sit down and play. He barked. She chose Chopin's Nocturne in C Sharp Minor, a piece full of sadness. As she ended the last note, she paused. The commander turned. She will live, he said. Not without my sister, my grandmother ventured. She too will survive, girt proclaimed. For 10 months, the two women remained in. Then they were moved to Auschwitz Birkenau, where again, they survived. When the war ended, my grandmother moved to London. There she continued a successful career and was fittingly elected a member of the Chopin Society. Natalia continued giving concerts into her 90s. I remember watching her walking unaided to the grand piano for her recitals, playing with such grace. She always wore short sleeves so that her Auschwitz number tattooed onto her arm remained visible. And then, in July 2007, at the age of 96, she died suddenly of a heart attack. One of the most important chapters in European Jewish history had closed, said the rabbi at her funeral as we listened to her recording of the same Chopin nocturne that had saved her life. The camps bequeathed to my grandmother a determination to survive, a courage that I will forever admire until the end. She looked so much younger than she was, always able to recall tiny details from years before. She travelled and entertained and even drove badly into her 90s. She was strong. She loved life. She was seemingly unbeatable. It was even as though she had chosen when to die suddenly, so as not to fade away through illness. And so as I sat looking at the gentle face of the elderly Macedonian, Jamila, there was a lot of my grandmother there too. Both were utterly lucid in their old age, both full of warmth. One had been spared the horrors of the camp, but lost her entire family. The other had been spared death, but forced to live through beatings at Pwaschow and Auschwitz. Both had endured untold suffering in their own ways. I will always feel a deep connection to the stories of the survivors, Jamila among them. With every sentence, every image that she paints, I can see my own grandmother, Natalia, on her way to the camp. And I can picture her decades on, sitting in her North London flat, telling me anecdotes over a bowl of chicken soup. Each of the survivors, each of those who lived through the agony of the Holocaust, passes on to the next generation, the responsibility to remember and inform and ensure that the stories never die of Jamila, of Natalia, and of millions more.
- [17:00]
D
And that was Mark Lohan. The trial began in Cambodia this week of the Three most senior surviving members of the Khmer Rouge regime, as many as 2 million Cambodians are believed to have lost their lives during the killing fields years of the late 1970s. The hearing's going on in the capital, Phnom Penh. But as Fergal Keen's been finding out, the city is changing rapidly from a place haunted by the ghosts of the past to one whose everyday life is driven by economic growth.
- [17:29]
C
In that last hour or so, before the pitch darkness of the Indo Chinese night rolls over the city, all life seems pulled towards the river. I'm reminded of the Beirut corniche at its liveliest, even the Parisian Left Bank. On a warm evening in August when the American journalist Harry L Foster travelled through here in the 1920s, he encountered a waterfront where the wares sprawl upon the sidewalks from out of shops like horns of plenty. You can get anyone to do anything for you, from making a pin to a fantastic pagoda, he wrote. These days, the citizens of Phnom Penh, their day's work done, promenade along Sisawat Key. There are young people dancing, perhaps as many as 100 in a group. I observe. I cannot hear the music. The noise of the traffic shuts it out. But they move with great deliberation and grace. Pleasure boats are plying tourists up and down the waterway while on the side of the road the bars, cafes and restaurants are filled with tourists from Asia and the west as well as the children of Cambodia's new elite. As for the recent past, that long corridor of madness down which Cambodia was driven between 1975 and 1979, of that there is no obvious sign, not in the faces of the dancing young or in the calm mask of the old. The official narrative is of economic growth moving on, not allowing the past to overwhelm the present. And to be fair, this isn't simply pushed by the government. On my flight into the country, I met Bill, a young Cambodian businessman who ran a telecommunications company based in Singapore. Bill had done well for himself, extraordinarily well, when you considered he was a child of the Pol Pot time. His father had been living in Paris. When the Khmer Rouge came to power, an appeal went out from the leadership for Cambodians to come back and help rebuild their country. What appeared to be an appeal to patriotism was in fact a plan to systematically eliminate all opposition. The returnees, among them Bill's father, were interrogated, tortured and killed. The aim was to create a rural utopia, a land without enemies. I know he was taken to tall slaying, Bill told me, referring to the infamous prison in the city. All we could ever find was a piece of paper confirming he was there. The body vanished with thousands of others into a mass grave. I assumed that Bill was returning to Phnom Penh to attend the trial of the Khmer Rouge leaders. No, I'm not. I'm here for business. He told me there was little doubt about his anger against the men he held responsible for his father's death and his own early life as a refugee. But building for the future was more important to him now. Certainly he hoped there'd be justice. But he had meetings to go to, plans to make and a happy home to which he could return. In Singapore, Sonny, our local interpreter, gave me another insight into the views of younger survivors. He was a child of the forced marriage campaign initiated by the Khmer Rouge. In a world where love was not allowed to exist couples were forced together to produce children for the state. His childhood had clearly been difficult. I don't think my parents liked each other, he said. But they had stayed together initially because separation would have meant death at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and afterwards, he said, because they needed each other to survive. In that word, survival lies much of the reality for the majority of Cambodians who lived outside the charmed circles of the political and business elite. While there is economic growth Projected at over 6% this year, the scale of poverty is daunting. In the countryside, inadequate health care, education and infrastructure frame the lives of the majority. This week, Amnesty International alleged that thousands of poor people were being driven from the land by developers with ties to powerful political figures. Any student of Cambodian history will know that poverty and exclusion were major recruiting agents for the Khmer Rouge. But the age of utopia and blood has long passed. The overwhelming imperative of the present is economic advancement. Against that reality, what can the trials of the aging Khmer Rouge leaders achieve? Perhaps they can say to government that it cannot ignore the needs of the peasantry that sooner or later frustration will find an outlet and to the people they might act as a reminder of where they can be led by men who promise paradise.
- [22:25]
D
Fergal Keen Arab League officials are today expected to begin planning economic sanctions against Syria after Damascus apparently ignored a League deadline that did end the violence against anti government protesters. Latest reports say that at least 27 people were killed in clashes yesterday. The United States and the European Union have already imposed sanctions and if the Arab League takes action too, it could prove difficult for a country which depends on its neighbours for half its exports and a quarter of its imports. James Harkin is one of the few British journalists to be allowed into Syria. In recent times, he's reported from the troubled city of Homs, the scene of numerous large demonstrations. But in the capital, Damascus, he tells us, there were fewer obvious signs of dissent.
- [23:13]
B
Make it to Syria, and the first place I recommend you go isn't the ancient citadel in Aleppo, the magnificent desert ruins of Palmyra, or even the stunning crusader castle, the Crack du Chevalier. See all three of them? But before you do, take a taxi to Damascus Old City, and ask for the Alhamidiyya Souq, the country's most visually stunning indoor market. Halfway along this palace of smells, you'll find the finest ice cream in the world. At the front of Bagdash Ice Cream Parlour, a man stands wearing white overalls, kneading and ponding a huge bucket of vanilla ice cream into a kind of dough. Then another employee chips away at a huge brick of the stuff, smothers it in pistachio nuts, and hands it over to the customer. It's called booza, and all that pounding accounts for the thicker, more satisfying texture of the finished product. Customers queue up to buy a token first, then queue again to take delivery of their cone. Last week, however, I couldn't help noticing that the queues at Bagdash were considerably thinner than the last time I was here, a year ago. This wasn't entirely surprising. Since an uprising sprung up against the regime in many Syrian cities earlier this year, the tourists have evaporated and the economy has begun to unravel. I wasn't supposed to be here at all. Syria is a police state, and most foreign journalists are banned. I'd only succeeded in gaining entry at the second attempt. After a good deal of perseverance and a series of strokes of luck. I'd arrived on the Monday evening, my adrenaline still pumping from the surprise of getting in, and the first thing I could think of to do was to go to the souk and stand there eating an ice cream. In the next 48 hours, I was to have more boozes than were strictly necessary. The plan was to hook up with Khaled, an opposition activist I'd met on a previous visit to the country before the street protests had even begun. When I'd first met him, Khaled was disgruntled with the regime but cynical about the prospects for change in Syria. But we kept in touch by Skype, and the Arab Spring had turned this skinny chainsmoker into a new man, a kind of cocky Syrian Che Guevara, chiding anyone who would listen that the revolution train was coming to his country, and that very soon it was going to be heading their way too. I text a mutual friend back in London who's in touch with him on Skype. Sit tight. I'm told Khaled is going to make contact. So I do. I walk the streets of central Damascus from cheap hotel to cheap hotel as inconspicuously as I can, biding my time by living off the city's incredible street food and sweet meats. I have my reasons. Tourists who stay at fancy Syrian hotels and who eat from the buffet often end up with crippling diarrhea. The last time I'd been here, I spent whole days hunkered over an Arab toilet in the middle of the desert, the trousers of my favorite suit around my ankles as if engaged in some tortuously ambitious new yoga position. Whatever you hear on the news, central Damascus doesn't look much like a city on the brink of a civil war. Life in the street markets and bazaars of the Old City goes on much as normal, and by the following afternoon I'm hovering around the fake designer watch stalls. I pay not much more than the cost of a few ice creams for a chunky contraption branded as a Dunlex. For a moment I imagined myself in one of those glossy magazine ads you see in the New Yorker, flashing it from the back of a taxi. I can even imagine the tagline some international business professionals wear Dunhill. Others prefer Rolex. Well, I'm James Harkin and I'm here to tell you to split the difference. In the evening I walk to Bab Sharkey, home to many of Damascus pubs and restaurants, but it's mostly dead. The Internet cafes, on the other hand, are full to bursting. In one bar there's a solitary huddle of young men, student types wrapped in trendy scarfs. I hear the words Mubarak and Arab League, but little else. They're virtually whispering. After two days, I've had enough of all this. Maybe Khaled is too busy organizing his revolution to talk to me. Worse, maybe he's been picked up by the secret police. He's been arrested before. In the morning I resolve to try to get to Homs, a city which in recent weeks has become the focal point for the Syrian revolt. But before I do, I stroll back to Bagdash in the old souk and stand there in the queue holding my ice cream token, as meekly eager as an eight year old boy.
- [27:52]
D
And with James Harkin queuing up again for ice cream in Damascus, we've reached the end of another edition. I'll be here again next Saturday morning with more tales from correspondents around the world. Why don't you join us? Goodbye.