← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Saddam Hussein Lives!
00:27:55
Stories from foreign correspondents. In this edition: Prashant Rao meets an Iraqi and...
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- [00:00]
A
This is a download from the BBC. It's the latest edition of from our own Correspondent, broadcast on Radio 4, and it's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Hello. Today, a provincial mayor gambles everything and takes charge of all of Italy. An extraordinary journey across Madagascar and a site of an illegal trade worth billions. It's been voted one of the world's finest cities. But the council in Melbourne stands accused of failing to look after some of its greatest architectural assets. And it may be more than a decade since the death of Saddam Hussein. But for those Iraqis named after him, the suffering's not over. Italy is being put under new management. Its latest political crisis has thrown up its youngest ever prime minister and surely its least experienced. He's Matteo Renzi, a relatively youthful reformer who's promising to bring sweeping and much needed change to jolt the country out of years of stagnation and deepening malaise. The Prime Minister designate is at this moment working behind the scenes to try to assemble a new coalition government. He is expected to be sworn in on Saturday and is likely to face a confidence vote in Parliament next week. Alan Johnstone's been watching the extraordinary rise and rise of Matteo Renzi.
- [01:19]
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Matteo Renzi is in his bones, a man of Florence. That's his place, the quite small pond where he became the biggest fish, the city's mayor. But Florence isn't where any real influence lies in Italian politics. Inevitably, all roads lead to Rome and Mr. Renci's just taken the route to the capital. But he's always very keen to catch the train back to his beautiful city on the banks of the River Arno. He seems a little uneasy in the palaces of power down here on the Tiber. But from now on, he'll have to do business in the most important of them all, the lower house of parliament. Mr. Renci's never been elected to it and he's only just started finding his way around the place. Very much the new boy. On his first day, he asked where the debating chamber was. He said he'd only ever seen it on tv. But he quickly got down to the business of putting together a new coalition. There had been round after round of talks with haggling, manoeuvring, demanding party factions. Matteo Renci spent years criticising and goading those in power. But now the burdens of government are becoming his, along with their requirement for difficult, messy compromises. Suddenly, here he is, at the age of only 39, a provincial mayor taking charge of all of Italy, just outside his old office in a Renaissance piazza up in Florence. There's a statue of Michelangelo's boy David with his slingshot on his shoulder. The naked youth is preparing to confront Goliath. And maybe young Mr. Renci knows a little how David felt. He, too is about to confront some formidable foes, like Italy's entrenched bureaucracy, its myriad interest groups, its corruption, its inertia. And there are certainly those who doubt that he's up to the battle to come, those who suggest that Mr. Renci, with his background in marketing and advertising, is more style than substance. In Florence's ancient town hall, I remember talking to one of his opponents on the council. She's watched him for years, and she conceded that he's a great communicator. But she argued that he tended to be better at announcing things, better at launching initiatives, than he is at following them through. It might be a mistake, though, to underestimate Mr. Renci. In some ways, his strength lies in his inexperience. This is a country where politics has been a game played mostly by old men. But in the eyes of so many Italians, they've played it very badly, with their corruption and their incompetence, they're seen as having marooned the nation in decades of stagnation and decline. But as an outsider, Mr. Renci was untainted by all of that, and he's tapped into the popular rage against the machine. In a nation crying out for change, he's presented himself as a break with the past. A few years ago, he declared that the entire political establishment ought to be scrapped. He was nicknamed il Rotomatore, the scrapper, and his bandwagon gathered momentum. He talks of the need to re energize the economy, to create jobs, of the need to reshape Italian politics in a way that would make the country easier to govern, more stable, less prone to crisis after crisis. And a lot of Italians would like to see those things happen. Matteo Renci is tougher than he looks. He's ready to take risks, he's pragmatic, he likes to move quickly, and he can be ruthless. We saw that when he reached for power last week. He struck at his fellow Democratic Party colleague, Prime Minister Enrico Letter ousting him. It was a manoeuvre worthy of another man of Florence, the Renaissance political thinker Niccolo Machiavelli. With his brash and impatient style, the ambitious Mr. Renci has made enemies on his way up. If he stumbles, they'll be waiting for him on the way down. But now his moment has arrived. The time for talking is over. He's promised much, and he must begin to deliver fast. And with all the momentum that he's gathered on his extraordinary rise to power, there's a sense that an unstoppable force is on a collision course with an immovable object, namely Italy's dysfunctional political system. The man from Florence is gambling everything here. If he fails, he'll go down in flames. So will Matteo Renzi manage to reform the system? Or will the system break Matteo Renzi? Either way, there will be drama here in Rome.
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That's Alan Johnston. Now there's some hope in Madagascar, the world's fourth biggest island, which is off the east coast of Africa, that the successful presidential election late last year could end years of political unrest. After a Coup there in 2009, the international community imposed sanctions which left the country in a state of poverty and economic paralysis. The new government, meanwhile, is being asked to tackle a multi million pound illicit trade in one of the most exquisite and rare trees in the world. Thomasin Ford's been finding out how the Bois de Rose, prized for its extraordinary ruby coloured wood, is being smuggled out of the island at an alarming rate.
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My search for the famed Bois de Rose, something I'd only ever seen in pictures, begins in a beautiful old cafe in Antananarivo, the capital. I'm waiting for a Malagasy blogger I'd met on Twitter. We can't sit here, he says when he arrives. This restaurant was bought in cash with Bois de Rose. Mafia money, he says, looking behind and around him as he speaks, worried someone may overhear him. This is my first introduction to Bois de Rose. Just mention the name and it's clear it elicits fear. The city has changed dramatically since my last visit, more than five years ago. Skips overflowing with rank rain, sodden waste fester next to street lamps that rarely turn on the uncollected muck seeping into the cavernous potholes that were a rarity before the military coup in 2009. I take a plane to Antala, along the coast on the northeast of the island, near the Atsinana rainforests, one of the UNESCO World Heritage sites. I check into a hotel and within minutes I see a hefty dark red table with legs the size of tree trunks standing before me. Incredible claret coloured streaks run through its centre. Is this Bois de Rose? I ask the hotel owner. He looks nervous, says yes, but clarifies it was made before the numerous laws banning the use and exportation of the wood came into force more than 10 years ago. I look around the Hotel. Everything, it seems, is made from Bois de Rose. The tables, chairs, wooden beams, knick knacks. On every shelf I pick up an ornament in the shape of a bowler hat made from Bois de Rose. That's not mine, he says. Someone came here yesterday trying to sell it. The following day I take a walk around the market. A woman tries to sell me a lamp made from Bois de rose. Only $3, she says with a smile. I move into the back streets and come across a young carpenter with his father. They're both glistening with a strange red powder glued to their skin. As I reach their workshop, I see it's the blood red sawdust from the Bois de Rose. It's plastered over every surface. But these market sellers and carpenters are just a microcosm of the booming illegal trade estimated to be worth billions of pound. I'm told if I want to see evidence of the wood being transported and smuggled out of the country, I need to go to a place called Capest, a small coastal village that's now the unofficial export hub of Bois de Rose. It's a nine hour motorbike taxi ride along a sandy coastal path interrupted by wide rivers, where we precariously balance the motorbike on a canoe. We pass processions of trucks and 4x fours piled high with mattresses, bags of R, crates of beer. Where are they all heading? I ask. Capeste, says a man beside me. Everyone's going there because of the Bois de Rose. I clamber out of the canoe after the final river crossing, wading through the warm, muddy water. The sound of noisy generators and blaring music systems hits me before I reach the shore. I feel like I've turned up to a party uninvited. I keep my head down, glad of the night sky, aware that a snooping journalist may not be welcome. But I take it all in. The hordes of men drinking cheap liquor lining the one street, the flat screen TVs sitting on makeshift tables, the prostitutes touting for business. It's clear money is being made here, and lots of it. It's not long before I start seeing the trucks weighed down with the rare precious wood making their way to the port. The that's where they're loaded onto boats in full view of anyone who's interested. I start chatting to a young guy. It turns out he's a logger. He tells me there are at least a thousand people in the forest looking for the trees. But it's hard work. You have to walk for at least two days before even Seeing one tree big enough to cut, he says much of it was pillaged during the chaos after the 2009 coup. I have a restless five hours of sleep before making the return slog back to Antala. I My eyewitness account of Capest is no surprise to the authorities. Everyone knows what's going on. They keep their eyes and their mouths shut. A man from the Ministry of Environment tells me. The future of this unique wood hangs on the former finance minister, Eraju Narampian, who's been declared president. Will he too keep his mouth and eyes shut, or is he ready to tackle the Bois Mafia Tamizin Ford there?
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In Madagascar, the leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah movement has promised that his men fighting in neighbouring Syria will emerge victorious. His organization is a staunch ally of the regime of President Bashar Al Assad, and it's thought that more than 200 of its fighters have already been killed in the conflict. In his televised address, Hassan Nasrallah defended the decision to send fighters to Syria, insisting they were there to counter extremists. Their involvement in Syria has led to reprisal bomb attacks on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon in which several people have been killed. Jane Beresford has been to the group's stronghold in the capital, Beirut.
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It might sound a strange thing to say, but one of the things I enjoy most about my job is occasionally having my preconceptions well and truly shattered. And it happened recently. So where are you going today? The beautifully made up, expensively blow dried hotel receptionist asked me. We'd been sharing daily updates about the itinerary for a documentary I was producing about the impact of the war in Syria on Lebanon. Her at her ak, I said I can't say with complete confidence what her expression signified. Perhaps shock, maybe pity. She definitely looked decidedly queasy. I think it's safe to say that a trip to Beirut's southern suburbs was not on her places to visit list. Over the course of a week we'd spoken to a Christian couple who profoundly disagree about the way in which Lebanon's destiny was linked to that of its neighbour. We'd been to Tripoli to talk to Sunni Muslims fighting with the Syrian Free army against President Assad. Now it was time to talk to those supporting Hezbollah, the Shia based, Iranian backed group supporting his regime. Hezbollah is a formidable force in Lebanon. Its military wing is considered by some to be more powerful than the Lebanese army. Hundreds of Hezbollah fighters are now believed to be involved in the war in Syria and the organization's political wing is carefully controlling interviews with its supporters. But after much negotiation, the Hezbollah press office arranged for us to meet the family of 17 year old Ali Kadra. He was killed at the beginning of the year when he was unlucky enough to be riding his motorbike past a car laden with explosives. A radical group linked to Al Qaeda said the bomb was an act of retribution against Hezbollah's involvement in Syria. The organisation's main support base lies in the southern suburbs, which I'd never visited. But knowing that the Shia are often viewed as amongst the poorest in Lebanon, I'm ashamed to say that I imagined them living in some sort of run down, rubbish strewn wasteland. As we passed through the Hezbollah checkpoint to the area, I noticed motorbikes buzzing around us. Hezbollah operatives, my colleague told me, checking out who the hell we are. As we made our way to the street where Ali died, I. I was about to have my first assumption busted. What opened up before us was a broad, prosperous looking avenue lined with brightly lit shops stocked with fizzy drinks, expensive chocolates and delicious looking fruit. It was not unlike my comfortably middle class neighbourhood in London. What was different however, were the tall dark men in navy blue bullet proof vests with prominently displayed AK47s preventing cars they didn't recognise parking along the street. They shouted at us to move along. A friend of the Cadre family had come with us to point out the charred remains of Ali's bike. She remonstrated with the young men of Hezbollah, telling them we were there to meet the family, reassuring them, don't worry, it's ok, I know them. Even though it was only days after Ali's death, his mother Hanan had agreed to meet us in her elegant fourth floor apartment. Her face looked bleached with grief, but she quickly offered us strong coffee and sweet moist semolina cake as she talked. Her voice broke as she spoke about her son. He wanted to go to Syria to fight, but I said no, he wanted to be an engineer, you know. We never felt it would happen to us. And it was here that I had my second preconception challenged. That Shia women are dominated by men. As Hanan talked, other members of the family joined us. There were now seven or eight women in the room. Most wore headscarves, but one in her 30s did not. She had curly hair, fashionably cut. There was a solitary man wearing a grey cashmere sweater. An uncle we were told, and I noticed he was gradually being pushed further and further to the end of a long sofa. As the various aunties shared their thoughts, he occasionally interjected with a view, but was quickly drowned out. I got the sense that this was the general order of things in this house. When I asked about Ali's father, Hanan told us he was in Germany on business. We paid our final condolences and prepared to leave. As I glanced back across the room, my last memory was of the uncle still clutching the arm of the sofa but now wreathed in circles of cigarette smoke. The women had respectfully not lit up while we were there. Now we were leaving. They were not holding back. As we drove away, I reflected once again on the fact that people's lives are always so much more complex than the stereotypes we have of them.
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Jane Beresford in Beirut now residents like Dame Edna Everidge never have a bad word to say about the Australian city of Melbourne. Visitors too will tell you it's a glorious place, situated on a bay and a river, and it has an enviable quality of life. It certainly looks good. Much has been said about its grand Victorian architecture and in particular its famous network of 190 lanes, now regarded as one of Australia's greatest tourist attractions. But Lyn o' Donnell tells us the city's fathers have selling some of them to property developers. It may be bringing in the cash, but some Melbournians are uneasy about how the council's treating a vital part of the city's heritage.
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My friends and I like to think that Melbourne is our secret, but for three years running, Australia's second city has topped the world for livability last year scoring 97.5% for stability, healthcare, culture, environment, education and infrastructure. The Economist Intelligence Unit left out a few essential elements of Melbourne's good life, like food and wine, beaches and forests and vineyards an hour's drive from the city centre. Earlier this year Melbourne hosted its 10th annual Laneways Festival, combining a love of live music with one of its greatest architectural assets and a network of lanes that ranks among Australia's top cultural attractions. The city was laid out in 1837 at 1 mile north to south, by half a mile east to West. With 10 latitudinal and nine longitudinal streets, the inner city was a grandiose centre of business, banking and fancy shopping. The lanes evolved to provide access for horse drawn carriages. Following the gold rush of the 1850s and 60s, the lanes led Melbourne's trajectory downwards and many became no go zones, haunts for criminals, buildings transformed into brothels, opium dens and speakeasy gaming houses. As suburbia flourished, the city centre slowly died and right into the 1980s the lanes were dark and dirty and many disappeared beneath faceless office blocks. But with the urban renewal of the 1990s, the spirit of Melbourne's lanes revived. These days, they're not only a colourful reminder of the city's past, but an integral part of its present. Bijou benchmarks of constant change with Japanese tea houses and Chinese dim sum diners, fine dining and trendy bars and fashion boutiques, bespoke jewellers, art galleries, coffee grinders, hidden jazz clubs and secret restaurants like the Italian Waiters Club, which opened on Myers place in 1947 and only recently put a sign over its door. Hosier Lane had clothing factories in the 1920s. Now it's a hip showcase of urban art thronging with tourists. Brown's Alley was renamed Dame Edna Place in 2007 and 10 impersonators turned up to celebrate. Cathedral Arcade retains its Art Deco features and is covered with original stained glass and LED light. Centre Place is packed with bars, restaurants and cafes, and the graffiti along its length features on promotional campaigns for the city. So news that Melbourne City Council has been selling some of the lanes to property developers has come as a shock. In the last two years, the council has earned more than $2 million from laneway sales. The cheapest was $92,000 for a slice of butcher's lane. The Most expensive was 146 square metres of Benson Lane for $975,000. This was the site of the vast Tattersall Horse Bazaar, then stables, then shops and banks, and now an elegant courtyard at the entrance to high rise Nauru House. The council was reluctant to provide details. The City of Melbourne does not actively pursue the sale of Laneways, said a spokesman. Sales were advertised and at market valuations, but that's not what the council told the Age newspaper in December when asked about plans to sell off another part of Elaine to the Queensland Investment Corporation as part of a huge office, retail and hotel complex next to Nauru House. A spokesman said the council does periodically consider the discontinuance and sale of roads and laneways, and the portions of laneways sold, he said, were surplus to council requirements. Few friends had heard of the Laneways sales until I mentioned them. Min was horrified. It just seems that developers have taken over the city, she said. Another girlfriend, Gabriel, said people would be more vocal in opposing the sell offs if only they knew about them. Joni moved from LA 30 years ago and says she could spend a year exploring the lanes and then have to start again because they're continuously evolving and she's always discovering a new place to eat or shop? Don't the lanes belong to everyone? She said. How are they being sold and is the income being used to maintain the rest? For now, there are no official answers. There are fears that the current development fashion for recreating lanes inside shopping malls could become a sterile alternative to Melbourne's organic laneways culture. A loss of any laneway is to be bemoaned, said the chairman of the National Trust of Victoria, Martin Purslow. They are vibrant, exciting places, critical to the character of our city, and we lose them at our peril.
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And that's Lyn o'. Donnell. Now you do meet people from time to time who are convinced their name was an elaborate joke on the part of their parents. Annette Curtin, Tim Burr and Barricade may well be among them. Others may feel under immense pressure to conform to their parents ambitions for them. Just imagine Mum and Dad's disappointment when Page Turner turns her back on a career in writing. Yet for some, their name is not just irritating, it's a real burden. Saddam Hussein, the brutal ruler of Iraq between 1979 and 2003, may have slipped out of the headlines, but he is far from forgotten. And today, apparently, there are still lots of men there named after him. Prashant Rao has been talking to some of them and soon learned that even though the notorious Saddam is no longer with us, that name continues to provoke strong reactions.
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Having driven for a couple of hours, we were finally stopped on the way into Aziziya, southeast of Baghdad. A policeman wanted to know what we, a team of journalists from a foreign news organization, were doing in his small town. As he looked over our papers, another man wearing a full length black robe and leather jacket, emerged from a car nearby. They're here to see me, the man said. And who are you? The policeman asked. I am Saddam Hussein. I know what you're thinking. What was Saddam Hussein even doing alive, much less introducing himself in a mostly Shia town? Wasn't he executed in 2006 after ruling Iraq with an iron fist for nearly a quarter of a century, heading a Sunni Arab regime responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, including countless Shias. But this was another Saddam, one who, like countless men both Sunni and Shia across the country, has been cursed with a name that was originally given in tribute to a vice president on the way up, but which has since become completely associated with a relic of a brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein Olaywi. The man I Met is a 35 year old Shia who ekes out a meager living as a neighborhood generator operator. He was friendly and generous, offering us a hearty lunch as we sat and talked about what his life has been like as the namesake of the former leader. He was named by his grandfather in 1978, when Saddam was not yet president but was on the rise and increasingly admired. But the name quickly became something of an albatross around his neck. School teachers held him to impossible standards, expecting the young Saddam Hussein to replicate his namesake's apparent successes. They punished him severely when he failed to meet them as a conscript reporting to join the army. He had expected that, at least in the military, soldiers and officers would be kinder to him, but in fact, it was the opposite. When he first reported to pick up his uniform, the officer on duty violently assaulted him when he declared his name angrily, accusing him of desecrating the president's name by daring to compare himself to him. After Saddam the dictator was ousted in 2003, Saddam the generator operator had hoped he would be freed of that baggage. But as with many things in post invasion Iraq, the reality was more complex. Political parties called his father and asked him to change his son's name, but the family declined. People still buried him on the street. Civil servants at government offices often refused to deal with his requests. Things got so bad that he even tried to change his name in 2006, but was put off by the lengthy time required to deal with Iraq's famously byzantine bureaucracy and the relatively large expense for someone of modest means. Other Saddam Hussains, from the mostly Sunni north and west down through the Shia south, told us of a wide variety of tribulations of their own. One Saddam, a journalist working in Ramadi, a Sunni city in the desert province of Anbar, said his father was fired from his government job because he could not convince his superiors that he was not a member of the dictator's b He had named his son Saddam. After all. What greater allegiance could he have shown to the ousted president? They argued. Others had more terrifying stories. One said he was captured by a Shia militia, set down on his knees, and had the barrel of a gun placed against the back of his head. Somehow, thanks to sheer luck, the weapon jammed and the militia eventually released him. One friend told me how, as a Kurdish school child in Baghdad, he had known a classmate named Saddam Hussein. While playing football with the boy, they would often shout at him, it is not only us who hate you. The entire country hates you. It has now been a decade since Saddam was captured, his regime replaced, and the public tributes to his rule taken down. There are no more statues, posters or landmarks honoring him. But there are these men, ones who were named, perhaps on a whim, who are now among the few remaining reminders of the dictator. I asked Saddam, the generator operator, how he responded to people who shouted him on the street, angrily berating him for his name. I only have the name, he said, sitting with his father in their modest one story home. A name, he said, almost pleading. It's only a name. It means nothing.
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The sad story of a man they called Saddam Hussein. That was Prashant Rao in Iraq there, and that's us out of town. More stories from around the world on Saturday morning. I hope you'll join us. Goodbye.