← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Syrian Ghosts
00:27:55
Many Syrian doctors and medical staff have fled the country as the violence there...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent, introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today, the ghosts who stalk the hospitals of Syria as more and more casualties are brought in. Winnie the Pooh and Tigger look on as Algerians decide not to vote in this week's election. Illegal loggers in Cambodia put down their guns and ask the BBC to lunch. And how cultural differences over nakedness brought blushes to a changing room in Berlin. The two massive explosions in the Syrian capital Damascus on Thursday killed more than 50 people. 300 others were injured in the blasts outside a government intelligence building. The attack left hospitals in the Syrian capital reeling. They were already finding it hard to cope with the fallout from the long conflict between protesters and the state. Essential drugs and equipment have been in short supply and many doctors and other medical staff have left the country. One has been telling her story to
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Portia Walker over cups of coffee in her large empty apartment in southern Turkey. Naima, that's not her real name, is telling me about life at the hospital in northern Syria where she used to work. She's 29, but looks much younger. It's just her and her husband at home tonight, so her arms and head are bare. In a bedroom next door, their one year old daughter is sleeping. The whole hospital is full of pictures of the president, she says. All around the building there are signs saying yes for Bashar Al Assad and yes for our nation. Visitors cannot enter without being scrutinized by the security forces. The hospital is constantly under surveillance from the security forces and from what are called the shabiha, or ghosts. They're the gangs of thugs that the regime uses as its enforcers. You can't recognise them. You don't know who it should be here or not, she says. But they are constantly watching. When one of Naima's doctor friends was overheard criticizing Bashar al Assad, his laboratory was destroyed and he spent weeks in prison. If protesters get hurt at anti regime demonstrations, they ask their friends not to take them to the government hospitals. When they do come in, Naima says, the security forces come in behind them. They stay in the same room and want to know who they are and who their friends are. I ask her what happens to these protesters afterwards. She doesn't know. Inside the city, she says, everybody is afraid. On television, they watch what's happening in the other cities. There haven't been attacks in Naima's hometown yet, but they all fear that they will be next. The shops close early.
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People.
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People worry that with the security forces focused on putting down protests. Thieves and criminal gangs will act with impunity. So why, I ask her, is she going back? Because of my degree, she tells me. She's two months away from finishing 10 years of medical training. She's very close to qualifying. It's too much, she insists, to give up now, so soon. She'll return, taking her young daughter with her, but leaving her husband behind. He's spoken out against the regime in public and cannot go back. I can't understand why she would risk returning at a time like this. It's only weeks since she was able to leave to join her husband in Turkey after enduring months apart. I always wanted to be a doctor, she, she explains, to have a position in society and to help people. Before I leave, she takes me to the room where their tiny daughter lies sleeping. They wake her, but she doesn't cry. She rubs her eyes and stares at me when her father picks her up and carries her out into the hallway. She even smiles a little when I kiss her goodbye. But when she realizes her father is leaving with me, we have a meeting with some of the smugglers who slip across the Turkish Syrian border. She begins to cry and cling to him. She is our everything, he tells me proudly. A few days later, I call him again. I have some more questions for Naima about what is happening at the hospital. She's already gone, he tells me. As I wonder what will happen to her, I think of another man I met near the crossing to Syria. Mohammed is a lawyer in his 40s. He spoke out against the regime and tells me they burned down his house and then his office. He says he's lost everything. It's cost him more than £100,000. Today he lives in a grimy flat in the suburbs of a Turkish border town. He shares it with a group of Syrian army defectors in their 20s who spend their days chatting on Skype and chain smoking. Like many of the tens of thousands of Syrians who've had to leave their homes threatened by the regime or fearful of the violence, he has nowhere to go now. He can't work in Turkey, but he can't go back to Syria either. Naima and her husband don't expect the violence in Syria to end soon. But she doesn't want to accept this limbo as a way of life either. Maybe a few more months there will mean that Naima will have the qualifications to get work elsewhere. Perhaps she'll be able to work again in Syria once all this is over.
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And that was Portia Walker. Questions about Pakistan are expected to be high on the agenda of the NATO summit in Chicago next week. The Americans want the government in Islamabad to reopen their convoy supply routes which used to run from the Pakistani port of Karachi to Afghanistan. They were suspended six months ago after NATO bombs killed 24 Pakistani soldiers close to the Afghan border. There may be attempts to link that discussion with Pakistan's ongoing need for Western aid. The country's already received billions of dollars in aid from the west, but Hugh Sykes in Pakistan this week says the money doesn't seem to have filtered down to the people who need it most.
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It's excellent here. Now there's political stability. It's terrible here. Now there'll be bloody revolution. Two views of Pakistan from two ends of the country the optimist is Maqbool. He runs a fast food joint in Rawalpindi. It's called Yummies. The pessimist is Abdulsatar Edi, the veteran founder of the Eadi Charitable foundation, which offers social safety nets here which are barely provided by the government. The meat at Yummies is grilled in front of you over charcoal. I go for the chicken paratha roll and fresh fruit juice. Local strawberries are in season now, so that's settled. Total cost 220 rupees, which is about 1 pound 50. While I'm waiting, I asked Macbool for news of his family. My girlfriend is very well, thank you. Your girlfriend or your wife? She is my wife and she is my girlfriend. I love her too much. Then he reaches for his phone to show me the latest photo of his three children, two daughters and a son aged 11, seven and four. They look happy, I say. They are happy, and so am I. Happy. I love them too much. And their future is political stability. Really enough. Doesn't the government actually have to do something? Yes, Maqbool agrees, especially about bureaucracy and corruption. He tells me a story about the public square in front of his business. The traders all clubbed together and bought a canopy for the small grassy area in the middle of the square so that people could sit in the shade and enjoy their food. It's hot here, above 35 degrees centigrade. For at least four months of the year, the local authority tore the canopy down.
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Why?
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You do not have permission. But, Macbul tells me, lowering his voice, they wanted us to pay them to leave the canopy in place. That kind of permission. Will you pay? I ask. Definitely not. I give nothing. I take nothing. And if you do pay them, they'll come back next month and want us to pay them more. Everybody I've met here over the past fortnight has stories and direct experience of official corruption, from paying traffic policemen to let you off your speeding fine to government contracts awarded with bribery and without oversight. Pakistan is ranked by Transparency International as 134th most corrupt nation out of 182. It's also one of the poorest. That is why Abdul Sataridi says that there will be bloody revolution here. His charity, which accepts no donations from government or from religious organizations, has a fleet of more than 2,000ambulances, all but replacing the government ambulance service, which is barely discernible. Another charity provides free food for the poor. Their Karachi soup kitchen operation prepares 63,000 free meals every day, an unhappy statistic for the 700 goats involved. What would Pakistan be like if IDI and the other charities didn't exist? I asked one of the trustees. There would be dead bodies lying in the streets. EDI also offers a free shroud and burial service. Abdulsatar Eadi himself is a genial 84 year old man with a long grey beard. He seems genuinely to want revolution. Anything, he says, would be better than the status quo. He believes that political stability here has delivered virtually no gain for the poor. But he also thinks that military rule would be much more beneficial for the poor of Pakistan than the variety of democracy in place now run, he claims, by elite politicians with with bank accounts in Switzerland and in Dubai. Pakistan is resilient and resourceful and in desperate need of repair. I went to a factory called Alucan in the huge industrial quarter of Karachi near the port. Alucan manufactures aluminium collapsible tubes, for example, the containers for bathroom ointments or effervescent vitamin tablets. The plant conforms to international standards for quality and working conditions. But the surrounding area is astonishingly neglected. The roads of this prime Pakistani industrial district are like some of the rough mountain tracks in the Hindu Kush. Cars and lorries labour along unmade surfaces, bumping through enormous potholes, kicking up dust. And some of the customers for the steel mill near Alukan don't seem able to afford the necessary transportation. The day I visited, four 80 foot long steel girders were being taken away on a couple of old wooden carts, each one hauled by a donkey. This in a country which has received $6 billion of civilian aid from the United States over the past 10 years. Perhaps it's helped to pay for the donkeys. But where's the rest gone?
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Hugh Sykes in Karachi. Algeria is one of the North African countries largely untouched by the Arab Spring, which brought revolution to some of its neighbours. This week, parliament parliamentary elections there were won by the National Liberation Front, the party of President Buttaflika, which has ruled for 50 years. An Islamist coalition, which came a distant third, has called the result fraudulent. The turnout was low. Chloe Arnold has been finding out why the election generated so little enthusiasm among Algerians.
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The crescent shaped Bay of Algiers shimmered in the searing midday heat and thousands of flags, green, white and red, hung limply from lampposts. Police officers by the dozen stood outside the polling stations and a military helicopter circled above the city. The only thing missing was the voters. Despite television and radio broadcasts, a dizzying array of campaign posters, and even text messages urging people to vote, most seem to have stayed away. I'm not bothering to vote because nothing will change after the election, Mehti, an architecture student, told me. He was on his way to a tiny cafe beside the university with his friend Zak. When I stopped him, Zak said he hadn't voted either. But if you vote, you can change who's in parliament, I suggest. And then won't that make a difference to the way the country's run? Mehdi and Zak shake their heads. Nothing ever changes in this country, Mehti says. We know that. We've seen it before. When we do try to change things, look what happens. There's some truth in what he says. In 1991, the country went to the polls in a parliamentary election the government had promised would be free and fair. Queues at the polling stations wound out of the door and down the street. Everyone wanted to vote, but when an Islamist party won a resounding victory, the government balked. It said the Islamists were planning to rip up the constitution and implement hard line religious rule. The election was cancelled within weeks. The country had descended into a bloody civil war as security forces tried to stamp out an Islamist rebellion. Over the course of the next decade, as many as 250,000 people would lose their lives. You can see why Algerians like Mehdi and Zak are haunted by the memory of their recent past. They remember the rapes and beheadings of what they call the Black years. And there's little appetite for more unrest. I leave Mehdi and Zak to their coffees and head to a school turned polling station in the LBR district. A huge white banner above the door with curling green Arabic letters exhorts Algerians to vote. Inside the election committee, a serious bunch sit at a long table in front of brightly coloured paintings of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger. There's a big transparent box on the table with a tiny handful of ballot papers lying at the bottom. The whole time I'm there, no one comes in to vote. A smiling man with a toothbrush moustache bounds up and offers to show me round. He's an observer from the RND party, the National Democratic Rally, one of the coalition partners in government, whose leader, Ahmed Uyahia, is the Prime Minister. The observer's name is Kamal and he holds a clipboard. This is where I write the number of people who've come to vote and I update it every two hours, he tells me. Two hours into the election, I ask how many have voted so far. Ten, he says sadly. Maybe we'll get more. In the afternoon, official figures from the election put the turnout at 42.9%, a number many observers say was laughably inflated. The low turnout was less a case of apathy than people boycotting a vote they didn't believe in. But then how to combat the high unemployment, the lack of housing and the miserably low wages for those in Algeria who do have a job. It's a question I put to Said, to Mehdi and Zak, and to all my Algerian friends. But they all just do the same thing. They shrug and say there's nothing they can do. In the run up to the election, the president, Abdulaziz Butaflika, travelled to Satif, some 150 miles southeast of the capital, to give a pre election speech. It was a shrewd move. Sittief was the cradle of the independence movement in Algeria. In 1945, an uprising there was brutally put down by the country's French colonial rulers, who would be ousted 17 years later. This year marks the 50th anniversary of independence. At the end of his campaign rally, the President veered from his set speech. He's old and tired and he's also ill. He called on Algeria's young people to get involved in politics. My generation's time has come, he said. It seems change is coming to Algeria, but will it be the change the people here are looking for?
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And that was Chloe Arnold. A United nations special envoy has voiced concern about the increasing use of firearms against human rights activists in Cambodia. He was there this week examining the controversial issue of land concessions. There's been a series of protests over environment, land and logging issues. Vast areas of pristine forest have been destroyed. In one incident, a prominent forestry activist was shot dead by military police. Guy Delaunay has been reflecting on the risks faced by protesters.
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Ratanakiri is a beautiful province in the north of Cambodia with volcanic lakes, waterfalls and huge areas of unspoilt forest. Most of the people who live there belong to indigenous hill tribes who worship spirits in nature. But peace has brought smooth surfaced roads and outsiders to rural parts of the country that were once remote. The hill tribes complain that the newcomers try to trick them and out of their traditional lands and hack down the trees which make up what they call the spirit forests. A young man from the Tampuan people told me he knew where loggers were at work and volunteered to show me. So we jumped into a battered pickup and slithered along a narrow trail through the forest. Suddenly we burst out into a clearing and immediately it seemed that we'd made a horrible mistake. Among piles of cut timber, there was a group of young men who didn't look thrilled to see us. Several were dressed in military fatigues and at least a couple were toting AK47 rifles. The only way out was behind us. I jumped out of the car, smiled and shouted hello. A slightly older man turned and beamed broadly. It turned out that not only did he speak English, but but he was an avid listener to the BBC. Instead of being held at gunpoint, we were invited to lunch. I remembered this incident a few years on when I heard about the violent death of Chut Vutti. I knew him a little. He used to be a soldier before getting a job with the British environment monitor Global Witness, which meant he saw at first hand the devastation of Cambodia's forests. When his employers were kicked out of Cambodia for alleging connections between the government and and illegal loggers, Vutti set up his own organisation. He helped indigenous people to form forestry patrols to seek out and chase away illegal loggers. If they found piles of cut timber, they'd burn it, making sure that those who destroyed the trees wouldn't profit. Vutti was good at PR as well as direct action. He brought hundreds of tribe members to Phnom Penh where they painted their faces blue and and dressed up as characters from Avatar. Just like the aliens in the film, their forest world was being destroyed by greedy outsiders. All these antics meant that Vuti wasn't short of enemies. Some of them were extremely well connected holders of land concessions that activists said were being used as cover for illegal logging. But he had powerful friends as well, thanks to his military connections. So it's ironic that he died at the hands of a military police officer. And from a personal point of view, it's haunting because he was doing much the same as my young Tampurian guide In Ratanakiri, Vutti was showing two journalists around an area which he believed was being illegally logged. They ran into military police who demanded their cameras. A heated argument developed. Then the journalists heard gunshots and fled into the forest. When they emerged, Vouti was dead in the driver's seat of his Land Cruiser, and a military police officer lay prone on the ground. As the journalists were surrounded by other men in uniforms, they overheard one say, just kill them. Thankfully, that didn't happen. They're both safe if traumatized. I don't believe Vuti was deliberately targeted, but his death is the most chilling example of what seems to be an increasing willingness to to use armed force against protesters. Just in the past three months, guards at a rubber plantation shot and wounded land protesters. The governor of Bavet City is facing charges for shooting at demonstrating garment factory workers. And in a reversal of the archetype, police threw stones at residents during an eviction in Phnom Penh. The UN's visiting special envoy for human rights in Cambodia told me these were worrying developments. Surya Subedi went to pay his respects to Chutvuti's family, and he said that bullets were just one part of the threat to protest and freedom of expression. In Cambodia. People seem to be exercising self censorship. They're afraid of being prosecuted for defamation and incitement, he told me. I've shared my recommendations with the government, but the implementation is frustratingly slow and I'm disappointed with the progress made. The government may be aware that this is a slippery slope. It suspended all future land concessions, though not those already in place. Chutvuti would probably have taken that as progress, but not victory. The indigenous people he worked with have promised they'll continue the movement he started, and that perhaps is the most fitting tribute to that intense, unorthodox and courageous man who knew the dangers of his job and was prepared to accept them.
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Guy Delaunay there. It may be distinctly chilly in much of Britain this morning, but in parts of Germany, summer's almost here, and for some that means it's time to throw off the clothes and go nude. Bathing naturism, or nudism, is well established in Germany, dating back to early 20th century health and fitness philosophies. There are nudist beaches all over the country, and some cities have sections of their parks reserved for naked sunbathers as well. Steve Evans in Berlin says that while Germans may have become used to naturism, it can sometimes cause the visiting Britain surprise, even some embarrassment.
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Sex in Germany, I imagine, is much the same as sex everywhere else. It was, as we know, invented in the 60s, probably in California. And since then, the techniques involved are probably pretty universal. But attitudes to sex, sexuality and nakedness are not. And in Germany, I have to tell you that I have been surprised, not least when I was in the changing room of the gym to which I go. There I was naked from the waist down, very naked, wrestling to get a T shirt off my head. And the T shirt was wrestling back. When I finally pulled the thing off, there before me was a woman, a pretty woman in her 20s, pushing her broom at my feet. This very real vision was the female cleaner in the male changing room. Our eyes met. I blushed. She pushed on blithely, unconcerned. Or when I went into the local sauna bath, which every neighbourhood has, my German friends told me that nakedness was de rigueur. So into the cabin I went to find two young naked women. They looked at me. I looked at the ceiling. Germans, or at least Germans in the non Catholic north of the country, say that the sight of the nude body is completely normal, natural, as they put it. And they say being naked is nothing to do with sexual. There is never a stir or a twitch of a sexual nature. To which I say, hmm. My skepticism was shared, by the way, by both the Nazi and Communist regimes. In East Germany, nude bathing became something of a sign of dissidence. Despite the exhortation of the Culture Ministry to protect the eyes of the nation, the Nazis welcomed what Goering referred to as the healing power of son and heir in making a strong nation. But he did disapprove of public nudity, which he called a cultural error that threatened female modesty. Both regimes lost the argument and demographics did the rest. In the Rubble after the Second World War, there were 7 million more German women than men. And in this atmosphere, an industry grew up which was very different from that in other Western countries, one much more aimed at women. Germany had a well developed mail order industry and it had exactly the right woman to exploit it. Beate Uze had been a pilot in the Luftwaffe. As a woman, she'd not been allowed to fight, but she did pilot planes to the front line. After the war, as the daughter of a doctor, she was beset by friends who wanted to know how not to get pregnant. She started providing them with condoms and with advice on how she thought men could be kept happy. It became what is still one of Germany's most successful businesses. All this has been described by the historian Elizabeth Heinemann, who told me that because the business was mail order, women weren't inhibited from buying. Particularly in the Catholic south. They wouldn't go into a shop, but they would order from a catalogue. Elizabeth told me that German women emerged from the war particularly independent and strong because the absence of men was so stark. But in the west of the country, traditional roles were gradually reasserted. Not so, though, in East Germany. Simone Schmollack writes for the Target Zeitung and a magazine, a women's magazine called Die Magazine, which was founded in 1929 and continued to be published in East Germany throughout the years of Communism. She told me that women in the east, and she was one, had genuine economic independence and that gave them a strength in their relations with men. Now that the Wall is down, cultural frictions are emerging. Here's the way she put When Western men go out with Eastern women, they the men sometimes have problems. Eastern women are so cool, the Westerners think, so independent, so free with sex, but then they want them to stay at home too. So speaks an East German woman. With such a mix of regimes and attitudes and cataclysmic shocks to relationships, there is now confusion in the unified Germany over the roles of men and women. Nowhere more so, I think, than when a sweaty, naked Brit strays into a gym or a sauna bath.
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Steve Evans and his moment of cultural confusion in Berlin brings this edition to a close. I'll be here again next week. Perhaps there'll be more embarrassing moments to reveal. Do join us. Goodbye.