← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Tennis in Baghdad
00:27:51
Jeremy Bowen laments the loss of everyday freedoms in Baghdad; Hilary Andersson the of...
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You have downloaded from our own correspondent.
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This edition is the latest one broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and here to introduce it is Kate Ady.
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Hello. Today, anyone for tennis? Not anymore. In Baghdad, as our man in Iraq laments the loss of everyday freedoms in a once great city. The abuse and neglect of mentally ill prisoners, which has seen America's jails dubbed the new asylums. Danger on the streets of Tokyo as zombie like pedestrians with their faces glued to smartphones threaten havoc on one of the world's busiest street crossings. And what's inside that Burmese beer barrel? I'll give you a clue. It's not beer and it's not exactly legal. Yesterday, Iraqi security forces found the bullet riddled bodies of 53 men shot recently near a town in a mainly Shia area south of Baghdad. It was not immediately clear who the victims were or why they were killed, but the current wave of violence engulfing the country shows little sign of easing up as the Iraqi military continues its fight with the Sunni militants isis. The country's capital, Baghdad, remains relatively safe for now, but its residents face a life on edge, always on high alert. Jeremy Bowen reflects on the daily freedoms he once took for granted, which have slowly been eroded by more than two decades of war.
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I used to go running in Baghdad. My course was out of the Rasheed Hotel, take a couple of lefts, then past a small police station that usually had a few mustachioed officers in blue shirts smoking outside it, and after that, down to the Ministry of Information, towards the River Tigris, then back. People looked at me as if I was mad. That was back in the 1990s. Even in the second decade of the 21st century, the habit of public exercise still hasn't caught on in many Arab cities. Even if it had, it just wouldn't be possible to do that run now. The Rasheed, Baghdad's best hotel, is in the massive fortified section of the city called the Green Zone by the Americans. They enclosed it with concrete blast walls, razor wire and guns. After the invasion in 2003, when they found they would not, after all, be welcomed by rejoicing Iraqis. I went back to the hotel for a meeting the other day with an Iraqi official. It's close to the Prime Minister's office. You can't even walk along the pavement I used to jog down. Twenty years ago, the BBC car wasn't allowed close to the Rasheed, so I was dropped off. Went through two checkpoints, down a narrow walkway, between two steep blast walls and past a couple of gun towers. The men in Them must have been quite alert. When I tried to take a sneaky photo with my phone. They came running up shouting as I rapidly deleted my snap. Instead of crossing the final bit of road, you go through a tunnel to get to the hotel gates. News teams were based in the Rasheed hotel. During the 1991 Gulf War, raids on Iraqi infrastructure meant there was no electricity and only around 30 minutes of running water a day. Every night during that war, I'd sleep with a window open to reduce the chances of the glass being blown in by blast. The chilly air of an Iraqi winter mixed with the rumble and crash of bombs and missiles. Right through the 1990s, the years of international sanctions against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, I watched Baghdad declining from being the well off capital of an oil state to becoming the blighted place it is today. After the war, I used to play tennis on the Rashid's courts in the evenings with a man called Naji Sabri, who a few years later became Saddam Hussein's last foreign minister. I liked Naji in the BBC office. We regarded him as our ally in the regime. But he wasn't always a sporting tennis player, making line calls that always went his way. I never argued. Now there's another war. It might be more accurate to say it's the latest episode in the same one. Guns and violence dominate the country. After the rapid advance by ISIS and their Sunni allies, there was a lot of talk about the newly elected parliament, the voting out the prime minister, Nouri Al Maliki, considered by Sunnis and even some of his own Shia community to be a big part of Iraq's problems. But the first parliamentary session ended with a walkout. One former Western diplomat who knows Iraq very well, told me that Maliki has spent so long on the dark side that he knows he's a dead man the moment he gives up power to a true rival. For now, the advance of ISIS seems to have stopped. Perhaps they don't want to overextend themselves. They've declared their caliphate their Muslim state. If there isn't a political survival plan alongside a military campaign against isis, the most likely outcome is that Iraq will become three separate entities. Kurds, Shias and Arab Sunnis. When I used to travel to Baghdad during the crises and sanctions and wars of the 1990s, it was always by car. On the highway from Jordan across the Iraqi desert. There weren't any flights. The road runs straight through Anbar Province. These days it's in the hands of isis. Back then I'd feel as if we were speeding down a long, narrow tunnel to the most isolated place in the world. But now I sit in Baghdad, and it's if the city is at the center, the center of a region that's on fire, the Middle east is going through a period of real and rapid change. Huge amounts of blood have already been spilt. Human pain is all around. I don't know where it ends, but I know it won't end for a long time.
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Jeremy Bowen in Baghdad. The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world, with over 2 million men and women locked up in institutions across the country. While that figure has been falling in recent years, American penitentiaries are still notoriously brutal places. Over the past decade, more than 80 inmates with mental health problems have died because of neglect in US jails and prisons, often locked up in solitary confinement, hardly conducive to helping their condition. Many more still suffer abuse today. Hilary Anderson has been visiting some of the penal institutions which are home to both hardened criminals as well as some of America's most vulnerable people. She heard disturbing stories of what happens when punishment takes precedent over prisoner care.
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When you drive through America, you may notice outside many towns, one distinctive large derelict building from another era, its windows boarded up. This will often be one of the notorious old mental asylums. America's halls of shame closed down en masse from the 1950s onwards because in them, many thousands of souls lived out their days abandoned, stigmatized, and all too often abused. You'd assume today things are far better. But modern America has an underbelly few see. On a brightly sunlit day, we headed towards the home of Teresa Von Miller in Michigan. She has bipolar disorder and sometimes spends days in bed struggling with the darkness that enshrouds her mind. Little wonder Tim, her son, died in jail in 2006. She showed us pictures of Tim as a child. He loved hunting and fishing with his grandfather, BMX bikes and skateboarding. But at 17, he began to show signs of withdrawal and mental anguish. He, too, was bipolar. Like many Americans, Tim couldn't afford mental health care as an adult. One day, Tim went to a local store and stole two paintball guns. When the police came, Tim begged them to end his life, saying he had nothing to live for. He was brandishing a pocket knife and and was arrested and sent to prison. Prison in America is no place to be if you have mental problems. But the reality is that 10 times more mentally ill Americans are in jails and prisons now than in state psychiatric institutions. Teresa insisted I sit with her and watch footage of Tim's last days in prison. I didn't want to, for her sake and for mine, and tried hard to talk her out of it, but Teresa insisted. She said it would empower her to watch it with a journalist. So I sat by a mother in her sitting room and with her watched security camera footage of her son dying in an American prison. In the long video, Tim is chained down to a concrete bed. The chains are chunky, and a large metal padlock sticks into his back. The prison was disciplining him for breaking a series of prison rules, including flooding his cell. Teresa sat bolt upright, and her face was like steel, watching. Look how calm he is, she said. He isn't fighting. But Tim was kept like that for five days, sometimes going more than 16 hours without a break. He urinated in his clothes and tore them off. Lying naked, he was fed with his chains on. The guards put a sandwich on his belly and most of it fell to the floor. Tim became delusional and screamed and pulled at his chains. On her leather couch, his mother watched until her son breathed no more. After dying of heat and dehydration, she didn't cry. I felt like the horrors of the world were exploding in my head, but kept silent. You wouldn't treat an animal like this, she said to me. Michigan's Department of Corrections eventually paid a settlement to Tim's family, but no one was ever prosecuted for his death. His story, which got brief attention, faded into the background. Today, chaining prisoners to beds is still legal in Michigan. What happened to Tim is the tip of the iceberg. The U.S. department of justice is investigating a number of jails and prisons for the abuse and neglect of inmates. With an acute shortage of mental health care in America, more than a million people with mental health problems are in jails and prisons. In the months I spent researching the problem, I spent many nights taking calls from mothers crying on the phone, telling me stories of their relatives being pepper sprayed, beaten, strapped to restraint chairs, even killed in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, all over. We got into two jails to see conditions for ourselves. In the maximum security division of one, we were taken into a unit inmates call the Hole. As we walked in past the cell doors, there was a cacophony of screams and profanity as inmates pressed their faces to tiny metal grilles. In another, I saw 30 men or so crowded into a small space, all with mental health problems, bursting with energy and muscle, pacing the floors with nothing to do. Worse, though, were those in solitary. In tiny, frigid cells, inmates lay on their beds with nothing but four walls and silence. In America, you can be in solitary for years. In these conditions, people who are imprisoned with nothing but their tormented minds often despair. They mutilate themselves, blind themselves, deteriorate beyond repair. This is not the Dark Ages. It's America in the 21st century.
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Hilary Anderson reporting. A curfew was recently imposed in Mandalay, second city of Myanmar, formerly Burma. It followed two nights of violence between Buddhists and Muslims. The country has been undergoing an uneasy transition since reforms were introduced in 2011, and President Tain Sen has said such violence is putting the country's development in danger. His government is keen to paint a picture of a country which is open for business. And violence aside, Mandalay is certainly trying to make the most of Myanmar's newfound economic freedoms. Alex Preston travelled to the city to see how locals and foreign investors alike are cashing in on the country's natural treasures.
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At first, I think it's a waterfall. A wave of liquid sound comes towards me over the brackish waters of the Irrawaddy River. As I get closer, crossing a bridge beside a flock of orange robed monks, the wash of noise becomes louder, more crystalline. I'm in Mandalay, northern Burma, a bustling city of a million people, and the sound is the clack and rattle of hundreds of thousands of precious stones in the world's largest jade market. I approach the market's entrance past workshops where teenage boys, cigarettes drooping from their lips, carve raw lumps of jade on viciously spinning wheels. The market itself is a vast and baffling warren. Row after row of traders with their iridescent stones laid out on white trays. At least half the traders are Chinese, and the voices that ring out over the clatter of sorting stones mix Mandarin and Burmese as they vie for business. Estimates place the value of Burma's jade trade at around four and a half billion pounds a year. Most of the jade goes to China, whose presence in Burma has been growing at a precipitous rate since the end of the military dictatorship in 2011. As I walk along one of the market's narrow alleys, sidestepping a slushy pile of betel nut pith, I see a Chinese trader, a woman in an embroidered skirt and Elton John T shirt, fix a loop to her eye to inspect a small pile of luminous green stones. She's haggling with a young man. We'll call him Breng Mai, a pseudonym, for reasons that will become clear. He's from Kachin State, the semi autonomous region in the far northeast of the country. The story of Burmese jade is inextricably tied to the turbulent history of Kachin, a once lush country of rolling hills and steep ravines that rubs borders with India's lawless Nagaland. The Kachin Independence army fought a long and bloody war against the Burmese government, with an official ceasefire declared in 1994. But tensions and outbreaks of violence persist, with Burma's security services asserting a heavy presence in the area. While the roadblocks and curfews may help keep the uneasy peace, they also ensure the government maintains control over the jade business. Later that day, I meet Breng Mai in his aunt's grocery store in downtown Mandalay. He's 23, absurdly handsome with a voguish blond streak in his spiked hair. He's wearing a Kachin Independence Army T shirt. The shop is bare and dingy, a single bulb hanging from the roof. On the dusty counter are eggs, toothpaste, joss sticks and prawn crackers. Bring. Mai leads me down a corridor, through a curtained doorway and into a back room, the centre of his smuggling empire. It's like the planet Krypton. Great mounds of jade, dimly glowing. It is all chinjalu, he tells me, a catch in word for jade of the highest clarity and quality. Known elsewhere as imperial jade, the shop is a front, run by his aunt as a warehouse for bring Mai's illicit operations. Sipping tea by the piles of precious stones, Breng Mai tells me that he went into the jade mines aged 15, although some working there were as young as eight. He says it was dangerous. There were regular avalanches. In one, our whole camp was swept away. I damaged my legs, but my best friend was killed. To trade legally, jade miners have to pay a tax to the government. Smuggling makes my profits much higher. Breng Mai says. I drive a beer truck from Pakan to Mandalay every few weeks. The barrels in the middle of the van are full of jade. The government carries out raids every so often, but so far I've been lucky. While the west has largely lifted sanctions against Burma in the wake of the tentative steps towards democracy taken by the government of Thein Sein, a ban on jade trading still exists. Conditions in the mines are abysmal, with the US government stating that the jade business contributes to human rights abuses and undermines Burma's democratic reform process. While foreigners are not officially allowed to mine jade, Breng Mai tells me that most of the major operations are now run by the Chinese. The Chinese pay the miners a lot more, but the conditions there are Even worse, he says, Kachin's formerly verdant hills are now scarred and treeless. When the Chinese are finished with Kachin state, he says, there will be no jade left. Already mines that were rich 10 years ago are running out. Until that day, the stalls of Manderley's labyrinthine jade market will continue to chime with the clatter of precious stones. The call of Chinese and Burmese voices as I leave bring my hands me a small sliver of dark jade for luck, he says. It has worked for me.
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Alex Preston in Mandalay as Europe remembers the outbreak of the First World War 100 years ago, an often forgotten group is preparing to commemorate a centenary their own. They're Aramaic speaking Christians known as Syriacs, who come from a remote corner of what is now southeast Turkey, where their churches and monasteries can be traced back to the fourth century. In 1915, their community suffered the worst of their many persecutions in a series of massacres known as the saifo, or the sword. Today their increasingly active diaspora, which stretches from Stuttgart to Sydney, is returning to their ancestral homeland to rebuild a new community. Which is why Diana Darke founded Little Bit of Australia when she visited Mardin province in Turkey.
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No need for alarm clocks in Midyat Every day in this ancient Syriac Christian town high on its plateau in southeast Turkey, I'm woken by goats bleating at my window and by cattle clattering past on cobbled streets. Kurdish children are herding them to nearby pastures from once elegant mansions that now serve as stabling for visitors like me. The livestock lends a rustic charm, but not for members of the Syriac diaspora like Gabriel Khoury, whose ancestral home is one such pungent stable. Gabriel's family emigrated to Australia when he was a boy, but now he has come back to claim his property. I have six court cases to fight, he declares, his blue eyes flashing angrily. I encounter him at church, where he leads the chanting in Aramaic, the language spoken by Christ. Then he takes me to the one roomed hovel, his current home, which is all he has left of his heritage. His surname, Khoury, reveals he comes from a line of priests. Long story short, he explains, I will not give up till I have my family's houses and shops back. Then, if God wills, I will rebuild them. Rebuilding is a constant refrain in this region called the Turab Din, where the Syriacs, one of the world's earliest Christian communities, suffered heavily at the hands of the Kurds and Turks, especially in the 1915 massacres known as the Seifo. At the village of Khafre I meet Niall, who has returned from 30 years in Stuttgart to help rebuild his community. An imposing row of large walled villas with a slightly fortified feel now flanks the single street. Alongside the ruins of the house where he was born. He has opened an al fresco pizzeria shaded by a nine sided gazebo draped with vines. Multiples of three, representing the Trinity, are everywhere in the architecture here, and vines too hold deep spiritual significance, producing wine from the precious blood stained soil. Traditionally, each family planted just enough for its own modest consumption. But now some Syriacs have set up a wine factory, imaginatively concealed in a mock mansion and carved with friezes of grapes and wine glasses, producing five reds and two whites to growing worldwide acclaim. Its carefully chosen trademark, Shilu, means peace in Syriac. Two more families are coming back this year, smiles Niall as he takes me to see the derelict shell of their original church. When our community is bigger, we will restore this one. For now we are using a smaller one. He leads me past a well tended cemetery where an open grave is awaiting the body of a 90 year old returnee from Germany. This land reclaims its old, but reclaiming the young is more problematic. Our teenagers, he explains, gesturing at a group just finishing their pizzas, will leave soon for universities in Germany. A school bus takes the three of them from Khafre to Midyat, where they are the only Christians in classes of over 40. How can we expect them to return here? Back in Midyat, Gabriel, the Australian, is on the case. The refugee camp established on a nearby hill was intended just for Syriac Christians for fleeing the fighting in neighboring Syria. But so successful were they in being sponsored to leave the camp that only one family now remains. People like Gabriel took responsibility for the Christian refugees, many of whom have since moved west to Istanbul. Some have stayed in Midyat, like Meriam, a fair haired beauty originally from Qa Mishli, just across the border in northeast Syria. She now works as a waitress at one of Midyat's magnificently restored Syriac mansions, converted to a 15 room hotel. Long story short, says Gabriel, we need more like this to bring our people back. More girls and more hotels. He even wonders if one of his sons might marry Miriam. His own wife was from Qamishli, and plans how young men might return from Europe as architects and managers to design and run hotels, as businessmen to create new enterprise, and above all as lawyers to champion their cause. I dare to raise December's controversial settlement of the land dispute with the biggest of the monasteries in the region. Don't make me laugh, he retorts tossing his head. They gave us 20 per cent. Only the other 80 per cent is still held back. Long story short, he continues, we will fight on till we get back what is rightfully ours. As the centenary of their historic massacre, the Seifo approaches. Long story short, maybe they will Diana
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Dark in Turkey now It's a sad fact that many people these days are seemingly more interested in what's on the screen of their smartphone than the people and places around them. Many of us have learned a new skill that emergency sidestep to dodge texting pedestrians engrossed in their Facebook or Twitter feed. This so called dumb walking is a relatively new yet growing phenomenon in Japan. But just how much is it undermining one of the world's most polite societies? Alex Marshall took to the busy streets of Tokyo to find out.
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It's 5pm on Friday and I'm standing in a coffee shop above Shibuya Crossing, the most famous intersection in the world. It's a place where every two minutes, over a thousand of Tokyo's smartly dressed commuters and fashion making teens gather at eight points, ready to cross, then rush straight for each other. It looks like they must crash, this sea of people, but they swerve and swing around each other like dancers pirouetting, and they all get to the other side safely. It's awe inspiring, so much so that at times it leads people, including myself, to say rather trite things about how it's the perfect symbol of Japanese society, the many individuals acting together for the greater good. But the reason I'm here isn't to gawp in amazement, it's in the hope that I'll see people crash. I want businessmen ploughing into each other, their umbrellas flying off their arms, and immaculately uniformed school children tripping grannies. Why may I get to see this now, when I wouldn't have had the chance even a year ago? It's very simple. Smartphones Smartphone use is booming in Japan. In 2012, only about a quarter of Japanese used them, most being perfectly happy with their everyday mobiles, which they could type on one handed without ever looking down. But people have now realised smartphones are just too useful to ignore, especially because they can be used to read newspapers and manga, those Japanese comics which have gone global without straining your eyes. More than half of all Japanese now own a smartphone, and the proportion is rising fast. But with that rise has grown another phenomenon, the smartphone walk. The dumb walk. It's that glacial pace people only adopt when they're staring at a phone screen their head down, arms outstretched, looking like zombies trying to find human prey. Researchers here have found people don't just walk more slowly when they're on smartphones. Their field of vision is reduced to a twentieth of what it should be. And some are worrying what this means for Shibuya. Recently, the Japanese mobile giant NTT Docomo released a simulation of what would happen there if everyone crossing was doing the smartphone walk. There would be over 400 collisions every time, it said, and chances are just 36% of people would get across. Orderly Japanese society as we know it would be at an end. Surprisingly, the person who seems most annoyed about this phenomenon is an American. Michael Koussek is a consultant who has lived here for over 20 years. In his spare time, he writes a popular political blog called Shisuku that has recently been littered with posts about what he calls dumb walking. I met Michael in Sugumo, a part of Tokyo popular of pensioners who, understandably enough, all walk incredibly slowly. He told me dumb walking probably wouldn't be a long term problem. Japanese phone etiquette is in fact better than anywhere else in the world. Hardly anyone speaks on their phones on trains, and teenagers wouldn't dare broadcast music out of them. If things got truly bad at Shibuya, the police would just start patrolling the crossing, shouting at people to look up. Until that does happen, though, he's going to carry on ranting. But really, is the smartphone walk such an issue? There's only one way to find out. So I leave the coffee shop, head down to the crossing and start typing an email, promising myself I won't look up until I get to the other side. I'm soon surrounded by people and only realize the traffic has stopped and it's my time to cross. When they start streaming past me as I step forward, the experience quickly becomes unnerving. Legs jump in and out of my vision without warning. Shopping bags fly towards my face before being pulled away at the last moment. I'm sure I'm going to get hit, but after a few seconds I relax. It's okay, everyone's reacting for me. And then I realize there are two people who aren't. They're directly in front of me and they're not moving out of the way. I try moving left, but they do too. I swerve to the right, but they do too. We're stuck. It's so silly. I have to look up. I expect to see two dumbwalkers just like me, but instead I find a young couple very much in love and very much refusing to let go of each other's hands just to get around an inconsiderate idiot on a smartphone. The girl gives me a look of such contempt that I quickly apologize and rush around them. That look was enough to ensure I'll never be done walking again.
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Alex Marshall trying hard to keep up the high standards of social etiquette in Tokyo, and it's time for me to bid a polite farewell. But you can hear more stories from correspondents far and wide this Saturday morning at 11:30. Do please join us then. Goodbye.