← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Sept 15, 2011
00:27:47
How did the lifeboat of the North Atlantic, as it's called, manage to cope with of air...
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BBC Radio 4 Presenter
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BBC World Service Announcer
This is from our own correspondent. You can hear the version of the program broadcast on the World Service by following the link to the BBC iPlayer
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BBC Radio 4 Presenter
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BBC World Service Announcer
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BBC Radio 4 Presenter
But now, presenting the BBC Radio 4 edition, here's Kate.
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Narrator/Reporter
80 today, fear amid the mud in southern Sudan. Hundreds of thousands flee their homes after finding themselves on the wrong side of a border. Black hooded monks and flocks of swallows look on as a holy day is observed on the banks of the River Danube. In Cairo, there's unease in the wake of the storming of the Israeli embassy there. And we find out how a remote community on the edge of the Atlantic coped with the unexpected arrival of 38 jumbo jets. The rains are pouring down in Sudan and there is concern about a new outbreak of fighting there in South Kordofan State, not far from the border with the newly independent south. Many of the tribesmen in the remote Nuba Mountains supported the south in its long battle for secession from the capital Khartoum. But now they find themselves living on the wrong side, the northern side of the new borderline. And Julie Flint's been hearing they're worried that when the rainy season comes to an end in a few weeks time, they will once again come under attack by government forces.
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Julie Flint
It was not perhaps the most complimentary of greetings. Julie Flint. The man exclaimed, waving at me from the other side of an ocean of mud. Are you still alive? Well, yes, I am, 20 years after I first visited the Nuba Mountains. But it has to be said, a little the worse for wear after two weeks of walking through mud, the kind of mud that stops your car as surely as a minefield and that sucks your shoes off your feet when you attempt to walk. I've been to the Nuba Mountains twice in the last eight months. On the first occasion, it took just over an hour to reach Kadougli, the capital of the state. From the airstrip where I flew in. On the second, it took four days. And that was only as far as a mountain overlooking the town. One of the reasons was mud. The other was war, which forced a long detour to avoid the government forces defending the state capital. I first visited Kadougli back in 1992, invited by the Sudan government during one of its periodic charm offensives. Many Nuba fought alongside the southern Sudanese in their 20 year battle for a democratic new Sudan. And in the early 1990s were the victims of a jihad declared against them by Khartoum. The jihad was one of the bloodiest and most brutal episodes of Sudan's recent history. Its aim was to destroy all life in the rural Nuba mountains and to resettle the entire population of insurgent areas in camps where the Nuba identity would be crushed by force. All this a decade before conflict erupted in Darfur. Regular troops and paramilitary forces killed 60 to 70,000 Nuba in just seven months. The mountains were blockaded and villages burned. Humanitarian access was denied, cattle raided, food stocks looted. Community leaders, educated people and intellectuals were murdered. Kadougla in 1992 was a dark, unsmiling place. Every single street patrolled by armed men. We had only a few hours there, and those hours were tightly controlled by military intelligence, making any genuine contact with Nuba quite impossible. One event stands out in my memory, though. The arrival in army headquarters of a pickup crammed with naked women and children. We were told they were Nuba fleeing from the rebels. The truth was, of course, the opposite. They were Nuba burnt out of their homes and forcibly displaced. Are any of them alive today? I doubt it. The next time I visited Kadougouli was in December last year, six years after a peace agreement ended the north south war, but denied the Nuba the self determination for which they too had fought. What a change. Music, traffic police in place of paramilitaries and the former Nuba rebel leader Abd Aziz Al Hillah living in a government building as deputy governor of the state. That building is now destroyed, the first target in the attack that began in June this year after the Nuba army refused to disarm in advance of the time frame stipulated in the peace agreement. The mandate of the United nations peacekeeping force has expired and has not been renewed. International relief workers and investigators have not been given access to the capital. This has severely hampered relief work and made it difficult to determine the extent of the abuses that the UN itself acknowledges were committed by government forces in Kadougli. Displaced Nuba I met on Kadougli mountain spoke of heavy shelling of Nuba neighborhoods, of militiamen looting everything, including doors and window frames, and of horrific attacks on anyone identifiable as being of Nuba, I. E. Black African origin. But detail was hard to come by. You don't understand, a young noble woman said to me when I pressed her for more detail. More detail. We were entirely focused on putting one foot in front of the other and getting our children to the safety of the mountains. We weren't looking around. We didn't want to make eye contact with anyone. And then I met a young man who had been in the governor's office, forbidden to leave in the first fiercest days of the fighting. A Nuba official. He was standing outside on the third day of the war, getting some air as Nuba civilians fled down the street towards the supposed safety of UN headquarters. He told me in a very matter of fact tone that he saw four Nuba girls he knew being chased by government forces. Three had their throats cut in front of him. What else did he see? I asked. Nothing, he said. After that I went inside and I didn't come out again.
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Narrator/Reporter
That's Julie Flint The Orthodox Church, and indeed other parts of the Christian faith have been celebrating the Day of the Holy Cross. It marks the occasion back in the year 326 when it said the cross on which Jesus was crucified was found by Saint Helena in Jerusalem. Yesterday, in eastern Romania, people travelled from miles around to take part in the festivities at a monastery overlooking the River Danube. Nick Thorpe, who is there during the summer, says many visitors believe it's a place where their ailments can be washed away in holy water.
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Nick Thorpe
Evensong at the Romanian Orthodox monastery at Dervent is in full spate when we arrive. Black hooded monks, like crows with voices as sweet as blackbirds, some as old as prophets, stand together to intone the psalms around Bibles as big as breeze blocks or stoop to kiss lip worn icons, their beards brushing the feet of the saints. Outside, an agile fellow with a long stick is dislodging fragments of swallows nests from the high rafters above the entrance to the church as agitated swallows fly in all directions. I suppress a Franciscan cry of outrage and then am glad I did. We try to keep just this one area free so that people going into or coming out of church don't get shat on, explains the monk with the stick. A rapid glance around the eaves of the rest of the quadrangle confirms his story. The monastery is a city of swallows, their undisturbed nests packed into every conceivable space. And the birds swarm like biblical locusts. In fact, there are so many swallows one might be excused for thinking that the monks themselves are just rare seasonal visitors. Afterwards, in the garden, as a full moon rides through the trees, the the priest, Father Attal, opens his heart to me. I like the autumn the best, he confesses, the changing colors of the forest from raw green to dark brown. But it's the Danube which keeps him here. His first memory of the river is when his Father threw him into it to teach him to swim at the age of five or six. He says he's been swimming in it ever since, mostly upstream, against the flow of a world with little time for faith or those who profess it. I never planned to become a priest. After my military service, I went to university, then visited this monastery by chance. And that was it. I cannot describe what happened to me, but I knew what I had to do. So he quit university, sold his books and came here. That was nine years ago. The monastery itself is young by Romanian standards, built in 1936 and was closed throughout the communist period, when it functioned as the offices of the local agricultural co operative. But the ancient crosses, which draw the crowds in September and which led to the establishment of the monastery in the first place, were carefully preserved. You can touch them in the chapel next to the church. Great chunks of stone carved by master masons, eroded by the wind and rains, polished by the fingers of the faithful. After a night in a simple but comfortable room in the guest quarters, even warm water in the bathroom at the end of the corridor, I walk down to the Holy Spring. The view across the river is spectacular. A bright ribbon wrapped around the forested island of Pakul da Suare. It's too early even for pilgrims. Only the snails are up before me, leaving silver trails in the dust. And with no one around, I remove my trousers and bathe my knee, an old football injury in the freezing waters of the spring. People come here with their needs. And occasionally, when I need some time to myself, I go across to the island, Father Atal told me the previous evening. And there I pray and swim and enter into communion with the river. After the early morning service, we say our farewells and I go in search of a boat. The ruins on the island are overgrown, but give a sense of the strategic importance the island once held. A Roman fortress was established here in the first century. Together with a large church, the island became a major military trade and religious centre, with its own mint and shipyard for naval vessels. The ruins lead down and disappear beneath the green waters of the fast flowing Danube. When the river level was especially low, they found scaffolding in the river bed once used to lift ships for repairs. Among the pleasures for me of travelling up this river are the sudden flashes of inspiration of previous inhabitants, planted along the bank like clues to guide future visitors. Among the items in the museum at Caloras is a wooden crucifix found on this island with the waves of the Danube, the clearly visible on the back. Often, when I see people swimming in the Danube. I realize they do not know how to use it. Father Atal told me how to use the currents to get to the shore. Likewise, in life, some people do not know how to use whatever God gives them how to live life to the highest intensity Nick Thorpe There have been
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Narrator/Reporter
appeals for calm in Egypt after last week's mob attack on the Israeli Embassy in Cairo. A security wall was breached, the Israeli flag was torn down, embassy papers were thrown from upstairs balconies. The Israeli ambassador who left the country after the incident said yesterday he never believed that anti Israeli protests in Cairo could reach such a pitch. He said he planned to return to the Egyptian capital as soon as his security and that of his staff could be assured. Relations between the two Middle Eastern neighbours have deteriorated sharply since the overthrow earlier this year over the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Thomas Dinham is in Cairo, where the atmosphere, he says, is still tense.
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BBC Radio 4 Presenter
Suspicion is a feature of everyday life in Egypt and a fondness of conspiracy theories is as much a part of the landscape here as the constant traffic jams and their accompanying symphony of blaring car horns. With the democratic certainties that greeted the immediate aftermath of January's revolution having faded, however, the climate of mistrust and unease about the hard won gains of the revolution and is becoming increasingly palpable. As disquiet sets in, so does the fear of foul play, backroom deals and increasingly malign foreign influences. I noticed this tendency towards cynicism whilst enjoying some of the incredible food on offer in Cairo. The streets are dotted with makeshift roadside restaurants where in the mornings you can pick up a veritable feast of quintessential Egyptian dishes that, thanks to a weak Egyptian pound, will only cost you around 50p. As dishes of seasoned eggplant, heavily spiced beans, salad, fermented cheese, chips, tamea and gorgeous whole grain Egyptian bread were laid out before me. I realized I was beginning to attract attention, and not just because of my appetite. A group of old men slurping tea mixed with incredible quantities of sugar was studying me and with obvious difficulty trying to explain my incongruous appearance in the neighborhood. Eventually one of the men struck up a conversation with me, revolving primarily around what exactly I was doing in Egypt at a time when most foreigners had left. I found my answers met with furrowed brows and clearly dissatisfied shakes of the head when suddenly raising his hand in front of his mouth, he in a conspiratorial gesture, one man shot, I bet he's from Israel into the ear of his friend. So quickly as to be barely discernible. I was shocked. In nearly six months of living in Syria, where orchestrated hysteria about Israel is integral to the very identity of the state, I had never heard the accusations surreptitiously levelled against me. Neither am I from Israel, nor am I Jewish, but as someone of unmistakably European appearance, I have found myself constantly associated with Israel. In Egyptian eyes, Israel is just one of a panoply of worries that exercise Egypt's cafe bound conspiracy theorists. The standard fare of political gossip tends to revolve around the trial of Mubarak, internal corruption, and the causes behind the dire economic woes Egypt is currently experiencing. A prosecuting lawyer at Mubarak's trial even introduced the novel idea that the ex president had died years ago and that the man on trial was none other than an imposter. With such stiff competition, I would hazard a guess that Israel struggles to make it into the top five political issues discussed in Egypt. Even then, Israel is probably just pipped to the post by concern over the rising power of Shia Iran in the region, something apparently worrying many in this overwhelmingly Sunni country, a concern fueled by a constant stream of stridently sectarian rhetoric broadcast from Saudi Arabia. In the byzantine politics of the region, hearing strident opposition to Israel and its greatest regional foe from the same person almost in the same breath is commonplace. Nevertheless, a strong and sometimes violent dislike of Israel is a fact of Egyptian life, something I was unfortunate enough to discover one day after a cross border raid by Israel killed several Egyptian security personnel. The Israelis had been chasing a group of gunmen who'd attacked an Israeli bus close to the border between the two countries. Whilst walking in the street, someone pushed me from behind with such force that I nearly fell over. Turning around, I found myself surrounded by five men, one of whom tried to punch me in the face. I quickly stopped the attack by pointing out how shameful it was for a Muslim to assault a guest in his country, especially during Ramadan. Relieved that a seemingly random assault was over, I was appalled by the apology offered me by one of my assailants. Sorry, he said contritely, offering his hand. We thought you were a Jew. In this climate of unease, last Friday's assault on the Israeli embassy in Cairo comes as little surprise. Being just one of a host of civil disturbances that litter the time past since January's revolution, Egypt's conspiracists are already discovering nefarious machinations behind this latest development. And with so many twists and turns since the revolution, this time they might just be right.
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Narrator/Reporter
Thomas Dinham in Cairo. There have been dire warnings this week from various parts of Europe about the continent's deepening debt crisis. Poland's finance minister said if the eurozone collapsed, the European Union itself could follow suit. The president of the European Commission, CESE Manuel Barroso, describes it as the biggest crisis in a generation. A fight is on, he reckons, for our economic and political future. And it is clear that more and more citizens are becoming casualties of that fight. Jobs are being lost and lifestyles are changing. Paul Henley has been observing the changes on a series of reporting assignments and argues now that increasingly Europe is becoming a continent of extremes.
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BBC World Service Announcer
In the last few months I've talked to international bond traders at an Italian bank, Greek millionaires in their leather seated Jaguars, metal workers on a German production line and former bakers in a rainy Irish dole queue. And on each occasion I found myself contemplating the same European story a widening gap between rich and poor. It's relative. I do realise that poverty in the Netherlands is a very different concept from poverty in Namibia. But part of the big European post war project was about improving everyone's living standards, about ensuring some sort of redistribution of the continent's wealth from from the top of the social strata to the bottom. And it wasn't all a myth. It's made my job easier that over the years I've usually been able to establish some sort of human connection with interviewees whose lives weren't that different from mine. The extremes of reporting the crisis have put paid to that. Take the few hours I spent earlier this summer touring with a mobile soup kitchen in the Algarve. We visited an unemployed immigrant with chronic lung problems who lived in an abandoned shipping container in a field. I took photos of where he slept under a tattered picture of the Virgin Mary, and I asked him some mundane questions. He cried quietly and accepted the €20 note I gave him to assuage my own embarrassment. Five minutes drive away, but on what might as well have been a different planet. I had Diet Cokes in the clubhouse of the Val Delobo resort with a self assured British couple in their 40s who looked fresh from the spa treatment room. Their chain of hairdressing businesses allowed them to spend half the year in a vast modernist villa overlooking Gulf fairways and palm trees. Of course, in those European countries like Portugal and Greece where national economies are so famously messed up, you expect grand inequalities, even if the number of people quietly slipping out of middle class mortgaged comfort into desperation still has the power to shock. But in Germany, widespread Poverty comes as more of a surprise. It was the Great Hope, the land of industrial miracle, where factory workers drove Mercs. Unemployment there is falling. The country's out of recession, exporting and frankly, taking advantage of the fact that many of its European neighbors no longer manufacture much. But my recent trip to the German industrial heartland was to find out about a new kind of employed poor. While executive salaries have rocketed, workers incomes have stagnated. And in the absence of a national minimum wage, hundreds of thousands of Germans with jobs have suddenly found that Aldi and Lidl are their only shopping options. Meeting Iris, a single working mum in her 40s, in a cafe by Essen railway station, poses some tricky moral questions. She's thin and anxious looking. She brings with her a strong sense of indignation and and a long list of sums that show the shortfall between her income and her bills. She works 32 hours a week in an office canteen on a wage that's so low, roughly €4 an hour, that she's eligible for benefits to top up her income. So what standard of living exactly does a rich, developed country like Germany, well known for its interest in social justice, owe its lowliest working citizens? Iris doesn't live in a disused shipping container. She has a two bedroom flat with a phone, a television and a washing machine. Her grievances include sometimes not being able to give her teenage son the money to go swimming or to a film. But Iris uses the language I'm hearing so often in every part of Europe these days. She says all the money is going to the Hoh Herrschaften, the toffs, roughly translated, and to the politicians who she says are thieving and out of touch and fresh from watching the TV reports of youths in London smashing shop windows. She predicts a riot. Leaning affably across his substantial desk in Berlin, the junior minister for work and Social Security seems less confrontational in his analysis of Germany's growing gap between rich and poor. The fact that that gap is not yet anywhere near as big as the UK's is reassuring, apparently. And a national minimum wage will, he predicts, probably come sooner or later. When the microphone is off, his focus shifts to the many people he says are fraudulently claiming benefits and working secretly on the black market. He tells me they must be cracked down on the police dog. The Schaeferhund, he says, mustn't just bark, it must bite. Even his press officer winces at the phrase. And as I shake hands and leave, I'm mentally adding Germany to the list of casualties of this great European crisis.
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Narrator/Reporter
Paul Henley There, 911 is one of those few news occasions you can look back on years later and recall exactly where you were when you watched those events unfold. On Sunday, various ceremonies took place commemorating the 10th anniversary of that day in the United States, in Britain and elsewhere. But Joe Fidgeon was in Canada, in a town which looked after thousands of air passengers stranded when, immediately after the attacks, the US decided to close its airspace.
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Joe Fidgeon
This isn't a fashionable thing to say, but I do like my wild animals in a bap. I've had crocodile sandwiches, antelope on toast, and now I was hunting for a moose burger. So I was disappointed to learn that the government had banned restaurants from serving them. I happened to mention this to Jill and Reg, whom I'd met for the first time about half an hour before. I've got a moose in my freezer, reg said. There was a short pause while I took this in. Why have you got a moose in your freezer? I shot it, Reg replied, quick as you like. Jill offered to turn a hunk of it into burgers. I felt a pull on my internal reins. But I needn't have worried. After all, this is Gander. If you've heard of gander and you're not Canadian, chances are you're a flying enthusiast. It's basically a huge airport. Built in the 1930s as a refueling stop for transatlantic airplanes, it was vital to the allies in the Second World War and prospered in the 50s and 60s. Concorde was tested here. NASA chose Gander as an emergency landing site for its space shuttles. It catered for planes forced to land for security or medical reasons. The lifeboat of the North Atlantic, it was called a town, was built next to the airport, its streets arranged in the shape of a goose's head and named after legends of the Lindbergh Street, Alcock Crescent, Earhart Street. It was flying high. But the jet age was cruel to Gander. Aeroplanes became more fuel efficient and flew on by without stopping. The town dwindled. Air Canada pulled out of the airport. House prices plummeted. Young people moved away. Then came September 11, 2001. Reg was on duty that day in Ganders air traffic control centre when the news came in that US airspace was being closed. Planes over the Atlantic had to land as quickly as possible and it was Reg's job, and that of his colleagues, to bring them down safely. Now, on first impressions, Reg looks tough. Someone you might think could throttle a moose with his bare hands. The kind of man you'd trust to juggle 10 times the normal number of aeroplanes. The sort who didn't argue with the pilot of one transatlantic plane who was refusing to land. He just told him he was going to get himself and his very important passengers shot down. But talk for a quarter of an hour and he seems to soften round the edges. I ask him what he did when all 38 unexpected jumbo jets were safely parked on Gander's Runway with nearly 7,000 people on board. I went to the kitchen. He says, you were hungry. No, but the passengers were. In the days I've been here, I haven't met anyone. I haven't even met anyone who's met anyone who didn't do something to help the stranded visitors. The guy dropping a load of firewood at Reg's house had persuaded one of the big food stores to empty its warehouse. He went on to do a stint running the catering at Ground Zero. A college principal opened up the school's 30 phone lines for the plane people to call home. His phone bill, normally two pages long, ran to more than 60 that week. He wouldn't accept any money for the calls. One woman laughed as she told me she'd offered her car to two women from New Jersey. I showed them where I'd parked it and said they'd find the keys on the seat. Their jaws just dropped. But I told them I wasn't concerned. I mean, where could they take it? This is an island. Tom was in the US Navy for several years and doesn't scare easily. But when one of the townspeople invited him to stay rather than camp on a hard floor, he said no initially. What do they want from me? He wondered. Are they going to rob me? When he'd been in Gander a few hours, it occurred to him that there was no ulterior motive and he gratefully accepted. I'd heard all about these acts of uncommon generosity and thought it read like a Hollywood script with Tom Hanks playing the local mayor and maybe James Gandolfini as the hard bitten New Yorker who has his faith in humanity restored. But here I was, eating a spiced moose burger with my newfound friends, Reg and Jill, clinking glasses chilled with cubes of iceberg and thinking that over the last 10 years especially, it's become commonplace to fear each other and that we're missing out. After lunch, I swung by the airport. There was not a plane in sight. The arrival and departure lounges were empty and I felt a twinge of sadness that the world is flying on past again without dropping in. But Gander is still here waiting to take care of any plane which finds itself in difficulty in the North Atlantic and offering a personal lifeboat service to anyone who passes by.
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Narrator/Reporter
And that's Joe Fidgeon in Gander, a town which still cares despite being stranded by the jet age. We're out of time, too. Back on Saturday morning at half past eleven. I hope you'll join us then. Goodbye.