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From Our Own Correspondent
Poached Pangolin
00:27:34
Story-telling from the world of news and current affairs. In this edition: Shaimaa in...
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- [00:00]
Aidan O'Donnell
You have downloaded from our own correspondent.
- [00:03]
Martin Fletcher
This edition is the latest one broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and here to introduce it is Kate Ady.
- [00:09]
Kate Ady
Today, mixed feelings as schools reopen in Peshawar after the Taliban massacre there last month. Syrian refugees struggle to survive an unusually cold spell in Lebanon. It's all aboard the Papal plane en route to Sri Lanka. Why a lovable scaly mammal may soon no longer be with us and the uphill struggles faced by cyclists in Burundi. Pupils and teachers have returned to a school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, where more than 150 people died in a Taliban attack in December, most of them children. Our Pakistan correspondent Shaima Khalil caught up with a family sending their children back to school and another who are mourning those they lost.
- [00:56]
Shaima Khalil
16 year old Jozeha Aftab liked watches. His mother, Andalieb, showed me at least six. This was his favorite, she said, handing me a sports watch with a black rubber wristband. It's been weeks now since Huzaifa has worn any of his watches. He was killed in the Taliban massacre at the army public school in Peshawar and was buried in his uniform. He had nice handwriting, look, his mother told me he liked to split his study notebooks into different subjects. He was very good at maths and wanted to become a scientist. He got that from me, she said and started to cry. Andalieb is a chemistry teacher at the school. She was there during the attack and knew her son was in the auditorium when militants started shooting. There was a bit of hope in my heart that he'd escaped with the other boys. She said. She found out what had happened to her son after the army came in and rescued her and other teachers at the school. Despite her grief, Andalib is determined to continue doing her job. The students are waiting for me. I have to go back and teach them. I'm not scared, she told me a month after the attack. The school has now reopened and on the day many pupils returned to class, Andalib only has memories of her son. She showed me his favorite sweater, olive green with beige stripes. She held it out for a few seconds and then hugged it close. It's not easy for me to show you these things. She wept again in her son's room on the other side of Peshawar on their first day back to school. Ezaz and Abbas were in the middle of getting ready. With sleepy eyes. They put on their school ties and green jumpers. 14 year old Ezaz was particularly reluctant to wear his uniform and go to school. He'd been in the auditorium and witnessed the massacre. We've been living a trauma for the last few weeks, his father, Nasser told me when someone knocks on the door or if he hears a banging noise, he starts shaking. When I met Azaz and his father after the attack, he was in shock. They started shooting and I was frightened, he told me. At the time, looking at him at the breakfast table, about to go back to school, he still seemed in shock. Of course I'm worried about my children, his father tells me, but I don't know what to do about. Also worried about their future. Abbas wants to be a pilot, Azaz wants to be a doctor. They have dreams. They must go back to school, even if I have to sit with them there every day. Pupils made their way back amid heavy security in higher walls, barbed wire and hundreds of TV cameras. Not an average school morning. Some of them even arrived with their arms still in casts inside. As they were received by Pakistan's army chief, the memories of what they witnessed that day and of the friends and teachers they've lost came rushing back. I had flashbacks. 16 year old Akif Azim told me when I met him the day after the attack. There were still blood spots on his uniform. Now his green jacket was clean and pressed and he seemed happy to wear it again. I had tears in my eyes coming in, but I also feel strong. Students only have their pens to fight with and we will use them to fight the terrorists. Since the attack, many schools across Pakistan have stepped up security measures. The army has intensified its offensive against militants. In North Waziristan, the government lifted a moratorium on the death penalty and set up military courts. But all of this has fallen short of making people feel safe. Many parents are reluctant to send their children back to school. They say the authorities haven't done enough to reassure families that a similar attack won't happen again. I caught up with Erzaz, his brother and father, at the end of his first day back. What was it like? I asked. I saw my friends, he told me.
- [05:17]
Kate Ady
The one source still alive, Shaima Khalil. In Pakistan, Syrians are the largest and most rapidly growing refugee population in the world. More than 3 million of them have been forced to flee to neighbouring countries since the start of the Civil War in 2011. The conflict has seen an estimated one and a half million people flee across the border to tiny Lebanon itself, suffering the aftershocks of its own 15 year long civil war. And to compound their misery, the worst storm that Lebanon has seen for a decade has buried hundreds of thousands of ill prepared Syrian refugees in deep Snow. Ruth Sherlock spoke with some of the people trying to plug the leaks in their shelters and keep their children from dying in the freezing temperatures.
- [06:09]
Ruth Sherlock
The small stove inside Umm Abed's tent burned rubbish collected from the street. Acrid smoke hung in the air. It stung your throat, it burned your eyes. Her three year old daughter, Mariam, had developed asthma from the poisonous fumes. But this, Abig knew, was the best chance she had of protecting her from the sub zero temperatures outside. In this makeshift camp in Lebanon's Bekar Valley and in thousands of others like it in the country, Syrian refugees had been facing the same miserable conditions. The shelters were pitiful. They were made of tarpaulin, plywood, potato sacks, no match for the most violent storm to hit the region in two decades. Some of the structures collapsed in the blizzard. Icy water seeped through the sides of others, soaking blankets and mattresses. Umm Abid used cooking pots to catch drops from the leaking roof. Efforts by aid agencies have meant that few have died this winter. But as the snow persists, people are getting ill. Close to Umm Abids home, parents queued with their sick children outside a tent where Melham Harmouche, a visiting doctor from a Lebanese charity, was holding an impromptu clinic. Mothers held their infants close as they waited, trying to protect them from the bitter wind. A father comforted his daughter, no older than five, her hair in plaits through a violent coughing fit. Few could afford the proper clothing to withstand the cold. Most wore the clothes in which they left Syria. Women who fled in the summer shivered in thin gowns and sandals. Some of the children had only socks on their feet. Others trod barefoot through the slush and mud. Dr. Harmouche worked fast. A quick listen through the stethoscope, a look inside the mouth, a hand across the forehead to gauge temperature. He diagnosed flu, tonsillitis, bronchitis, pneumonia. The storm that the Lebanese named Zayna is only the latest burden on the Syrian refugees whose own country is locked in a seemingly endless war. Even though the number of people fleeing the conflict is still growing, the level of aid has been reduced dramatically. United nations food vouchers have been cut by a third, to just £12.50 per person per week. So Umm Abid can no longer afford drinking water. Buckets hang from the roof of the shelter to collect rain. At the beginning of the war, Lebanese communities mostly welcomed Syrian refugees. Some even offered rooms in their homes for free. But as the influx continues and the conflict prepares to enter its fifth year, that hospitality has soured into resentment. In the Bekar Valley, and in other parts of Lebanon, local residents have burned refugee shelters to the ground. Gunmen have fired on settlements blindly spraying bullets through the walls of canvas tents. In some areas, curfews for Syrians are being enforced. No one goes out after dark. Lebanese society mirrors the religious and political divisions that have grown so toxic in the Syrian war, and there is also a fear that the conflict may spill over into Lebanon. But ultimately, much of the tension is down to money. The rapid population increase in this tiny country has placed an unbearable strain on the economy. Rents and unemployment are high. Salaries have been slashed in the small town of Mesha in the north of the country. As many as a third of the local Lebanese employees have lost their jobs since the start of the Syrian crisis. Some of the local residents are now poorer than the refugees they took in. On a weekday afternoon, the grocery shop in Meshha was bustling with Lebanese customers, but few could actually afford to pay. Instead of handing over cash at the till, many took their shopping on credit. Ammar, the shop owner, noted down their names, the amounts owing and the date of purchase in a thick notebook where he listed their debts. It was the third such book on his counter, and it was almost full. The Syrian customers exchanged goods for UN vouchers, but the Lebanese were not eligible for any aid. It's a matter of humanitarian feeling, said Amara. If someone who lives near you, a neighbor, comes to the store asking for bread to feed his children but can't afford to pay, how can you refuse? They pay me back when they can. He shrugged. But it's an impossible situation.
- [10:57]
Kate Ady
Ruth Sherlock on the Syrian refugees in Lebanon struggling to survive the winter. Everyone knows that elephants, rhinos and tigers are in danger of being poached to extinction. But there's another creature, a shy nocturnal animal never popularized by Walt Disney or Rudyard Kipling, that is just as remarkable in its way and in just as much danger of disappearing. It is, in fact, the most poached mammal in the world. The Zoological Society of London has now launched a campaign to save this little known creature. Martin Fletcher traveled to a remote corner of Vietnam to find out more.
- [11:38]
Martin Fletcher
In front of a drab government building near Vietnam's northern border with China, a young conservationist named Nagayan Van Thai prises open a flimsy wooden crate. With a machete, he lifts out four plastic sacks and places them on the ground. From each sack, he pulls out a brownish black ball with a scaly exterior that's roughly the size and weight of an ice curling stone. Gradually, and very, very cautiously, one of those balls begins to uncurl, revealing two blackcurrant eyes, a long snout, an even longer tail and a soft pink belly. It's a pangolin, one of the world's more remarkable creatures. The pangolin is the only mammal wholly covered in scales, and it simply curls itself into an impregnable ball when threatened by predators. It eats 7 million ants and termites a year, using a tongue that's almost as long as its body. It has no teeth, so it stores stones in its stomach to grind up its food. The reason many of us have never heard of pangolins is because they seldom survive in captivity. Only six zoos in the world and one in Europe, Leipzig, have any. Pangolins enjoy one other unfortunate distinction. They are the world's most trafficked mammal. While the media focuses on the plight of the elephant and the rhinoceros, the celebrities of the natural world, roughly 100,000 pangolins a year are being snatched from the wild and sent to China and to Vietnam. In both those countries, their meat is considered a delicacy and their scales are deemed to have magical medical properties. Already there are no pangolins left in great swathes of Southeast Asia, so Africa's pangolin populations are now being plundered. All eight species are threatened with extinction. As Prince William recently remarked, the humble pangolin runs the risk of becoming extinct before most of us have ever even heard of it. The four pangolins in the crate had been confiscated by Vietnam's Forest Protection Department from two traffickers caught riding motorbikes in to China along a forest track at dawn. The conservationist Thai heads an NGO called Save Vietnam's Wildlife, and he planned to take them back to a rescue center that he runs in Kuk Phong national park, south of Hanoi. Unfortunately, one was so weak after days of captivity that it died before he could get it there. As we drove, South, Thai explained how pangolins, so common in his childhood, had all but vanished from Vietnam's forests and were now smuggled in by boat or truck from country like Indonesia or Malaysia. They come in loads weighing several tons. Dead and alive, fresh and frozen, gutted and skinned, live ones are the most valuable. Before selling them, traffickers often pump their stomachs full of gravel or rice starch to increase their weight. At the rescue centre, we watched some of the pangolins emerge from their burrows at night, and I began to understand why those who work with them find them so endearing. They resemble artichokes on legs. They are gentle, solitary creatures with an almost comic, rolling gait. They carry their young on their tails and curl round them to protect them. They use those prehensile tails to hang from branches or to stretch out almost horizontally to reach ants nests. Thay said the authorities sometimes caught the traffickers, but only because rivals had snitched on them. But they did practically nothing to stop retailers selling pangolin products. The next day, he took me to Hanoi to show me what he meant. In the space of an hour, we visited four randomly chosen traditional medicine shops in the city's bustling old quarter. Three produced pangolin scales, touting them as a cure for everything from cancer to acne to poor lactation in mothers, they asked £1,000 a kilo. Asked why they were so expensive, one woman replied with no apparent shame, because they're rare and illegal. With equal ease. We found restaurants selling pangolins to eat for £160 a kilo. Believing me to be a tourist, one restaurant owner explained that a live animal would be brought to our table, its throat would be slit and the blood served as an aphrodisiac. He recommended that we had the meat steamed and the tongue chopped up for soup. He then produced a large jar of rice wine with a small dead pangolin pickling inside it. He offered us that for an extra £125. It was a repulsive sight. The problem, thay complained, was not Vietnam's poor and uneducated, but its wealthy elite, the senior government officials and the wealthy businessmen who ordered pangolin to flaunt their status or to celebrate a deal. He added angrily, 90 million Vietnamese can no longer see pangolins in their own country because a few rich officials and businessmen want to eat them. That's disgusting.
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Kate Ady
Martin Fletcher. This weekend, Pope Francis is in the Philippines, one of the largest Catholic countries in the world, with some 80 million Catholics. On Sunday, he's due to celebrate an open air mass for up to 5 million people. Earlier this week, he travelled to Sri Lanka, where the Catholic community of just 1 million turned out en masse to see their spiritual leader. Our religious affairs correspondent Caroline Wyatt is travelling on the papal plane with the Vatican journalists covering the visit.
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Caroline Wyatt
She's the one who broke the Pope's resignation story because she understood Pope Benedict's Latin, says a voice in my ear. It's the BBC's Rome producer Julian, giving me the rundown on the Vaticanistas waiting at Rome airport for the papal flight. They're the press pack who specialise in reporting the doings and sayings of the Pope and the thousands of bureaucrats in the Vatican curia. There are relatively few other jobs in the world today that would reward a fluent knowledge of Latin with one of the biggest global news stories of 2013 the unexpected resignation of the last pope. His success at Pope Francis has proved a blessing for professional Vatican watchers. A global religious leader who makes more news than almost any other, his off the cuff remarks often appear to embrace a kinder, more pastoral Catholicism. While his wish to reform the Vatican has not endeared him to all who served there. I was curious to see what the man behind the headlines was like. So flying on the Vatican plane with the Pope was the perfect chance. At first it felt slightly surreal. For a start, the journalist waiting to travel with him, the Vatican accredited media personnel, or vamps, are just that well dressed, elegant and displaying a distinctly Italian sense of style. On the way to the plane, we're handed a thick bundle of press information. It turns out that I am Vamp 69, a number I have to wear around my neck for the rest of the trip. The inside of this Alitalia aircraft is a restful, muted grey, the only touches of colour the papal coat of arms on every headrest. And once we're in the air, the curtains at the front of our section are flung open. Where normally you might expect the steward with the drinks trolley. I see a familiar friendly face, so I smile back and then suddenly realise it's the Pope. The other vamps are well ahead of me, almost all now holding up their camera, a host of iPhones glowing like fireflies in the semi darkness. On every screen is a tiny virtual Pope, while the real one advances gradually down the aisles, saying hello and shaking hands. The 78 year old is in immaculately ironed papal robes and taller than I'd expected. He also exudes that unmistakable aura that comes with the possession of power, earthly or otherwise, with the vamps he knows well. He exchanges a joke and roars with laughter before moving on. Then suddenly, he's next to me, so I introduce myself in faltering Italian. The Pope's hand is warm and he offers a firm but gentle grip. So what does he expect from this trip? I ask. He bends closer in to listen and I assume to decipher my appalling Italian accent. Well, see, he says with a big smile and goes on to shake another dozen hands or more. And just as suddenly, the curtains close and my brief encounter is over. As we fly, though, Pope Francis and his staff continue their work through the night. His blessings, prayers and warm wishes are telegrammed from the heavens to the heads of state beneath, to each country from Albania to India that the leader of the world, more than 1,1 billion Catholics, flies over. It's a reminder that the Vatican has endured for centuries, and it thinks in terms of centuries. A papal visit can take months or perhaps years to set up, but its relationships reach back further and deeper, making the Pope not only a spiritual leader but also a flying diplomat whose services recently helped thaw the long chill between the US and Cuba. As Pope Francis steps out into the bright heat of a Sri Lankan morning, high on his agenda as he visits the island's 1 million or so Catholics is bringing people of different faiths together, people who spent so long tearing each other apart. That aim is explicit in every speech, from the biggest gathering at a mass by the sea to the smallest at a Buddhist temple. The Pope's message that no human being should kill another in the name of religion, whatever their differences, and that true faith means living in peace. After the recent killings in Paris, those words resonate far beyond this lush green aisle. We don't have an armed conflict anymore, one Tamil newspaper editor says. But when it comes to the more emotional needs, like the need for the truth about what happened, we have much more to do to carry on the healing. And the Pope is a special leader. He can listen to people, and that's very important for many here who feel that their voices have never really been heard. It's true that the Pope's smile is at its broadest when he's able to meet some of those who've lined the streets or slept out overnight to catch even a fleeting sight of their visitor. Five years after the war officially ended and with the new government in place, the people of Sri Lanka have already had a glimpse of peace. And like my brief look behind the papal curtain on this voyage, it it's left them curious to know how the rest of their journey unfolds.
- [22:43]
Kate Ady
Caroline Wyatt the cycling season in Africa has ended. For 2014, an international level race in Rwanda and a smaller event in Madagascar were the last items on the calendar. The year long Africa Tour was dominated by teams from North Africa, Eritrea, Rwanda and South Africa. But smaller teams made declarations of intent much further down the rankings. One of these was the national team from Burundi or. Correspondent Aidan o' Donnell caught up with them as they were trying to figure out how to get themselves and their bicycles home from a race.
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Aidan O'Donnell
On a sunny Monday morning, I find five cyclists from Burundi along with their support team of three, sitting in a dark hotel room. It's cramped with the nine of us in there. The team has just completed One of Africa's major cycling races, the eight day Tour of Rwanda. But there's only one item on the agenda this morning. How are they going to get home from Kigali to Bujumbura, Burundi's capital? They cycled all the way here for the race. Are they really going to have to pedal almost 200 miles home after the event as well? The cyclists are all entirely amateur in their resources, at least, if not their mindset. Their leading member, Das, rides a bike delivering milk. When he's at home, he tells me he travels 25 miles outside Bujumbura to collect 150 liters. Then he rides it all into the capital. Then he tells me he does it again. A tidy 100 miles in a day. His colleague Ismail, rides a Velo taxi carrying people around Bujumbura on his bicycle. Another team member is a businessman, although his teammates correct him with the distinction that he's less businessman, more trader. One rider divides his time between school and work in a restaurant. The fifth is a carpenter. In the hotel room, the team pours over my map, pointing out the route they cycled to get Bujumbura, Kayanza, Ngozi, Kurundo and then over the border into Rwanda. They spent an entire day waiting for clearance at the border, sitting on the side of the road until dark, when they were finally allowed through. When they got off their bikes at their Kigali hotel, It was after 10 o' clock on a Friday night. Das Obedi, Tarsis, Ezekiel and Ismael had covered almost 200 miles. They were to start eight days of racing on Sunday morning. The bikes that Burundi's team travelled on and raced on were donated by the international cycling body, the UCI. Without these machines, they tell me, they couldn't have come. But even with them, and with a spare bike donated by a French team, they still felt dreadfully under. Equipped jerseys and energy drinks had been donated and their cycling federation essentially handed round a tin to get them to Rwanda. In the evenings on the Tour, they repaired their punctures. But the Burundi manager, Folston, is an optimist. He's looking to yellow jerseys on the Africa Tour inside of three years and tells me that in the months to come, they'll be racing on the Tour of Congo, at the African Championships and in Rwanda again. Their showing in Rwanda was very respectable this year, three of the riders surviving the week and pulling back places in the peloton every day. It was a happy improvement on their 2010 effort, which saw them give up en masse after only two days. Burundi cyclists tell me they're proud to wear their three starred red and green national jersey, but are frustrated at not having the equipment or resources to prepare properly. They want to send a rider to the World Cycling Centre in Switzerland and another one to a cycling centre in South Africa. Once again, though, they don't have the travel costs and they can't cycle to Switzerland. Back in the hotel room, a call has come through. A man has a small van that he might be able to drive to the Rwanda Burundi border to take the riders and bikes some of the way back. It sounds promising, but I hear no more about it. A hotel worker asks them, so you're cycling home then, are you? In front of the hotel, the five Burundi riders hand over their bags, fill up their water bottles, clip their shoes into their racing pedals and slowly freewheel down the hill with just a nod to their manager. It's midday and it's warm and they have a lot of road ahead of them. I'm traveling through the city center a few minutes later when I see them again, threading their way softly through the traffic. 24 hours earlier, the roads were lined with screaming fans as the Tour of Rwanda concluded in noise and speed, with lap after lap around the city. Although the crowds are gone, the five men from Burundi think there's room for one more piece of cycling heroism. And they veer left off the main road, headed south for the border and on home.
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Kate Ady
Aidan o', Donnell, bringing this edition to a close. More correspondence stories next Thursday. I hope you'll join us.