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From Our Own Correspondent
Terror in Northern Nigeria
00:27:45
Will Ross on the bloodshed in Northern Nigeria;Theopi Skarlatos on why Golden Dawn is...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent. You can hear the version of the programme we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our site at BBConline. But here's the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
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Good morning. Today, censorship, fear and fascism. We hear why golden dawn is becoming Greece's worst nightmare. Shambolic India. Business is booming, but what about power cuts and burst balloons? We ask of privileged Princeton. Why donate billions to one of the world's richest universities? And we find out why the French Prime Minister reminds people of a small chocolate covered bear. In the past few years, the militant Islamic sect Boko Haram has spread terror across northern Nigeria. In the north there's a large Muslim majority, whereas the south is mostly populated by Christians and animists. The group, whose name means Western education is forbidden, is fighting to overthrow the government and establish an Islamic state. It has attempted to enforce Sharia law in several regions and attacked churches. Amnesty International says Nigeria's security forces are using the wrong methods to combat the group and are only worsening the conflict. Nearly 3,000 people have been killed since 2009. Kaduna, a town on the dividing line, is a place where many have sought refuge from violence in other parts of of northern Nigeria. But as Will Ross discovered, it's not much of a sanctuary.
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Out of breath, seven year old Rita was holding a lady's black sandal in her hand. She'd just run home and then back to the church. Mummy says this is her shoe, she said to her uncle, standing beside a pile of different coloured pears. They'd all been abandoned in the panic when the bomb had gone off during the Sunday service. Now, days later, people were returning to collect their belongings. Rita's mother, with a badly cut leg, was recovering at home, having just been discharged from hospital. When you have a problem, you tell your mother, you tell your father. So let these bombers come out and explain what they want to the government. But they must stop killing innocent people, said Rita's uncle before staring at the scene he'd escaped from. The pews where the choir had been sitting were smashed to pieces, hymn sheets amongst the debris. The entire floor of the church was covered in shards of brown glass from the windows that had blown in. There were drops of blood everywhere. The building had turned into a gruesome attraction. Outside, people snapped photos of the wreckage of the car bomb on their mobile phones. Come here, I've something to show you, a man said. We walked for about 30 metres and there down an alleyway were the remains of a car seat, twisted metal and orange foam. This is where the suicide bomber landed, he said before pulling out a phone to show me a gruesome picture of the bomber's corpse before it had been taken away. The Nigerian authorities believe this attack was carried out by the Islamist militant group known as Boko Haram, which has bombed many churches this year. The car radio was playing jazz music. The DJ kept lowering the volume to say things like, this is a time to pray for the victims. And then after a few more bars, he'd add, let us come together as one and pray. His slick style of delivery with a hint of fake American accent seemed bizarre considering what had just happened. But then I realized he'd probably delivered these lines many times before. Northern Nigeria is not seeing a lot of peace these days. As we headed north to the city of Kano, we passed petrol stations with queues that stretched as far as the eye could see. We stopped to get fuel where there was no queue, but the price was vastly inflated. I was handed a receipt. He's left it blank, the taxi driver said. He's stealing by selling at such a high price, so he expects you to steal by filling in the receipt yourself, he explained. We passed rice plantations and cornfields and plenty of roadblocks made of sandbags and car tyres. Soldiers carrying assault rifles were waving people through, it seemed, without checking anything or anyone. Over the previous few weeks, reports of army atrocities had been growing with the military trying to crush the Boko Haram fighters. Many civilians were being killed. In Kano, I met a father grieving for his son. He held a photo of proud 18 year old Ahmed standing next to his motorbike. Ahmed had been working in a petrol station when Boko Haram attacked the police nearby. The soldiers didn't ask any questions. Yunusu Shaibu told me. They just fired at my son and two other people in the station, he said. I served this nation. I was a soldier. I even went to Lebanon as a PeaceKeeper in the 1970s and this is what our army does to my son, he said before staring into space. This is happening on a startling scale in towns to the north east of Kano. I arranged to meet some people who just fled the area because of the violence there. After a Boko Haram attack, the soldiers just shoot anyone who's in the area and carry away those they catch, a student told me. After the army shot people in Potiskum, I went to the hospital, a student said. I saw 30 bodies. I saw them with my naked eyes, I counted them. On Thursday, Amnesty International released a report into the army's atrocities in northern Nigeria. As a press conference was taking place in the capital, Abuja. The killings were continuing in a city called Maiduguri. After morning prayers, I was marched off to a field with my sons, where many people were lying on the ground, a Muslim cleric said. He described how the soldiers had told him to face the West. And then came the gunshots. They killed four of my children in front of me, he said. When he went to collect their bodies at the mortuary, he saw the corpses of 48 youths who'd been killed. I checked this with another resident of the town. It's happening every day, he said, before adding, yesterday I saw two army vehicles full of bodies. It's terrible. I can't go out of my house.
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Will Ross now back in Lagos. In Greece, growing xenophobia has been making headlines. There are attacks on immigrants and police collusion with neo fascist vigilantes. The far right golden dawn is currently the third most popular party and it's just opened up offices in New York and Toronto. This week, a journalist arrested for publishing a rich list of some 2,000 suspected tax evaders narrowly escaped jail. Some fear democracy is under threat in the country which supposedly invented it. Meanwhile, the government is trying to push through yet another package of austerity measures. But as Theope Scarlattus has been finding out, a Greek social crisis is fast catching up with the financial one.
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I'm stood in the square of Agios Pandelej Monas, reminiscing about the Greece I used to know as a six year old girl. I remember playing in a similar square next to a decorated church, buying chocolates from the kiosk, skipping with my friends, old Greek yayadas or grandmothers looking on. Somehow, back then, the breeze carried along with the summer pollen this intense notion that you lived in the best place on earth. But now, off Akarnon street, migrant children play ball games on a floor scrawled with graffiti which says Greece is for Greeks. On the corner, plain clothed policemen handcuff Somalis without papers and a one legged man limps past on crutches begging for money. The stone walls beneath the church are stained with the words Chrisi Aviye or Golden dawn, the far right party whose ideas are gaining popularity here at an incredible pace. A mile up the road, some more graffiti reads down with the fascists. The Greece from my childhood, it seems, is nowhere to be seen and people are fighting to try to reclaim it. They have to. They say, for the government has no real plan. Ahead lies only a sea of endless debt. This week, another set of spending cuts and tax measures has been announced. Thirteen and a half billion euros worth. The Prime Minister is quick to point out the chaos that would ensue should they not be passed promptly by Parliament. Rarely these days does he talk about the chaos that is now. Debts are rising, the economy is shrinking, there's high unemployment, an increase in drug use, depression, prostitution. At the most extreme, people have been filmed foraging for food in bins after dark, and school children are reported to have collapsed from malnutrition. It seems a long way from the pretty pictures on dusty postcards at stalls beneath the Acropolis. But Golden dawn, with its 18 seats in parliament, gains voters by talking of a golden Greece that once was a Greece under Alexander the Great, prosperous and at the forefront of science and philosophy. If it were in power, the party says, there would be no more orders from Frau Merkel. Immigrants, or invaders, as it likes to call them, would be sent back home. Greece is for Greeks. Members see it as their right to take law and order into their own hands. They've been accused of beating up, even stabbing immigrants, trashing their market stalls, and of stripping and humiliating women. When we visit Golden Dawn MP Ilias Panayotaros at his shop, his staff are busy printing T shirts emblazoned with swastika like symbols. His party is preparing, he tells me, for a civil war with everybody. It's not nice, he says matter of factly, but someone's got to do the hard stuff. The anti fascists take to their motorbikes to protest. But with figures suggesting half of the police force support golden dawn, they get little sympathy from the authorities. Some protesters tell us they were imprisoned and tortured by officers who openly praised Stalin and Hitler. The police deny the allegations, but forensic evidence later confirms that protesters suffered grievous bodily harm by a sharp object. One of the victims is required to be off work for a month. The public order minister has ordered an inquiry. Before I leave, I go to see the director of the controversial play Corpus Christi, which depicts Jesus and the apostles as gay men. He is Golden Dawn's latest target. On opening night, arm in arm with nuns and priests, party supporters managed to shut down the theatre. They glued the locks of the entrance door shut and threw rocks at ticket holders. The director cannot control his emotion when he tells me that his parents receive daily phone calls telling them their son will soon be delivered to them in tiny pieces. Three days ago, he cancelled all performances. Freedom of speech here is under pressure, as is freedom of the press. One journalist has been arrested for publishing the names of 2,000 well known Greeks who hold Swiss bank accounts. Two more have been suspended from state TV after accusing the government of censorship. And so it's fallen to the international media to portray as true a picture as possible of what's happening in the country that once gave birth to democracy, but which is now struggling to show it's still in possession of it. I no longer feel sad to be leaving a country that without fail manages to keep a hold on my heart every time I visit it. This time I'm sad about what I'm leaving behind. I'm sceptical about whether I'll ever see that grease again. That grease which my 6 year old self playing in the square has managed to keep alive in my memory for so long.
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Theo P. Scarlattos this weekend, America is struggling to recover from the storm which has killed at least 90 people and caused more than £30 billion worth of damage. We've heard a lot about the plight of New York, but much of New Jersey lies in tatters after Superstorm Sandy flooded streets, ruined beachfront homes and washed its famous boardwalks into the sea. Princeton, the state's best known university, has not escaped unscathed. Campus roads were blocked, vehicles smashed and 50 trees were felled by freak winds. But Princeton is one place that can easily afford the repairs. Dave Edmonds has been exploring the intimate relationship between education and money in America and admits he's fascinated by the college's formidable esprit de corps.
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First heard at a college football game in the 1880s, it's called the Locomotive Cheer because it's supposed to sound like a train engine. Hip, hip, rah, rah, rah. Tiger, tiger, tiger, sis, sis. SS boom, boom, boom.
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Ah.
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Princeton, Princeton. Princeton. The new intake of undergraduates, over 1,000 freshmen, has arrived at one of the world's most elite universities. Decked out in orange and black T shirts, they're jammed together on steps that rise up to a gothic arch. They're being taught the Locomotive Cheer, a Princetonian anthem. A few of them look bemused, one or two cynical. But the vast majority are belting it out with gusto. They've just emerged from a welcoming ceremony where the president of Princeton was referring to the Occupy Wall street movement, which claimed to represent 99% of the population, said that they, the students, were the 1% granted exceptional opportunities. With those opportunities, she warned, comes hefty responsibility. It turns out that part of their burden will be to their Old College, their alma mater. 60% of alumni regularly contribute to Princeton, which now has an endowment of over $17 billion. I'll repeat that figure. 17 billion. That's more than the GDP of some entire countries. There are only 7,500 students here, so it works out at over 2 million per student. What's the secret? Well, the Locomotive Chair is one way in which the university imbues its students with an indelible sense of pride and community. It's a lifelong relationship. Thousands return annually for reunions, where there are seminars, bands, parades and balloons. Each class elects a fundraiser, and somehow a cunning university tricked this. It's become a tradition for different years to compete in generosity. Can the class of 1987 raise more than the class of 86? On notable reunions, the 25th anniversary of graduation, for example, a class will collectively collect millions of dollars. The signs of conspicuous philanthropy are everywhere. All the buildings and halls are named, usually after the benefactor who's funded it. This goes too, for gardens, walkways, even the bridge. The names read like a potted industrial history of America at the turn of the 20th century. There are gifts from those whose fortunes were forged in heavy industry, such as steel magnates Henry Frick and Andrew Carnegie. In the 21st century, the university has received windfalls from Princetonian pioneers of the digital age. There's now the Bezos Centre for Neuroscience and the Whitman Residential College, after, respectively, the founder of Amazon and the president of ebay. Mike Shoack is in his final year. He's a cheery chemical and biological engineering major. He has much to be cheery about. British students, cover your ears. Mike's not from a wealthy background, but will leave Princeton not a cent in debt. His fees were met by the university, and he's by no means unique. My grant is from a class in the early 1800s, he says, so there's no one left alive to thank. Seniors like Mike are put under some pressure to start donating to Princeton as soon as they graduate. Mike's happy to oblige. Princeton's given me a gift, and I want to repay it to a European. That seems weird. Why not give instead to cancer research or to some poverty alleviation program? It makes sense to support the destitute. Why give to a billionaire? It's bizarre, laughs Bruce Leslie, a professor of the history of education. You'd need an anthropologist to make sense of it. As a member of the alumni association, he too is a regular contributor in a US College is an important part of your identity, he says. For some, the most important Part the quaint town of Princeton is a haven from reality. Crime free, poverty free. Many Princeton undergraduates are from comfortable backgrounds and will in turn go on to earn big salaries. Their sons and daughters will be given favourable treatment if they too apply to Princeton. Privilege begets privilege. With all its affluence, the university can afford state of the art laboratories and swanky sports facilities. The day is drawing to a close. Shadows are spreading across the campus lovingly tendered lawns. The word campus derives from a Latin word for field and was coined at Princeton in the 18th century to describe its lush green grounds. At dusk the half light glows off the stone which in the early days was extracted from Princeton's very own quarry. The freshmen are still on the steps practicing their Princetonian songs. The music echoes around the arch and bounces off the spires and parapets. Another outsider next to me mumbles a subversive thought. It's a cult, he says. It's indoctrination. Maybe so, in which case I need treatment for the mind control has worked. I want to belong. I want to be a Princetonian.
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Dave Edmonds and you can hear more about the upper echelons of American education in the series Influence by Degree on the BBC World Service. A report earlier this year predicted that India would overtake China to become the world's biggest economy by 2050. But the country's GDP growth has stalled. The slowdown has been made worse worse by political paralysis, endemic graft and a drop in foreign investment. Meanwhile, many Indians are asking why their country, supposedly an economic powerhouse, suffers from so many power cuts and why so many things just don't seem to work properly. And as Anu Anand explains, quality of life in India, even for the uppermost classes, leaves a lot to be desired.
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It's been two years since my family and I moved to India full time, and when I look around the boxy, expensive flat we rent and reflect on how I've spent my time here, inevitably I feel a bit tired. On the bright side, I've managed to produce a second child work and have some amazing adventures. But I also see many lost hours spent endlessly repairing and sorting things. I've lost count of how many electrical sockets have melted for the past month. Strange electrical fluctuations in our sitting room have turned it into a discotheque. We've even had light bulbs explode above our heads. No wonder my electrician has become my best friend, visiting us on average twice a week, all too often while we're getting ready for school and work. The water supply to the bathroom suddenly disappears, leaving everyone in mid wash or with a mouthful of toothpaste. It's yet another one of those maddening Delhi dilemmas. Why is there water cascading off the roof from an overflowing storage tank and yet no water in the taps? Our landlord, as unflappable as ever, had a novel suggestion. This time he recommended we thump the taps. So while my husband and I went upstairs to try this, my three year old son ran for a pee into the marble clad bathroom whose door opens directly onto the shower floor. His foot flew out from under him and he landed with an audible thump, dazed and shivering before yowling for nearly 20 minutes in genuine agony. Not the thump my helpful landlord had in mind, I thought, furious as I checked for signs of a concussion. My son survived, but I often wonder how long I'm going to As I speak, my toilet flush is malfunctioning for the umpteenth time. A new metal cake stand I bought yesterday doesn't fit together. And while inflating a pack of party balloons for my children, I'm finding every other one has a hole in it. That's not to mention the broken pavements, nor the dogs that roam freely in terrifying packs from nightfall. I know, I know. India is an emerging power, and a poor one at that. A few dodgy party balloons or stray dogs do not matter. But chronic inefficiency has a profound social and economic effect. Yes, there are now malls and fancy cars here, but the people in them, India's upper classes, routinely fall ill from unclean food, dirty water and mosquito borne diseases. Like them, I too have hired an army of domestic staff to help keep the problems at bay. But I can't shake the view that if the roads, power, water, hospitals and courts worked, we could all get on with more important things. Curiously, like my landlord, the many Indians seem almost proud of being able to deal with constant inefficiency. Some have even suggested that this is an asset and encourages creative problem solving. But increasingly that suggestion is laughed at, especially by entrepreneurs in this burgeoning economy who are trying to create jobs while fighting death by a thousand cuts. One Internet entrepreneur described how his business survived a difficult startup and predatory monopolies, only to fail once raw sewage began seeping into his offices. Rather than being compensated, he was sued for being late with the rent. Nowhere I've lived has proven as fertile ground for Saud's Law. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong than India. So what explains this epic inefficiency? My economics professor had an answer. India he told me, has long had an economy based on digging holes and filling holes. Things go wrong by design so that a multitude of middlemen can earn a living by fixing them. That was okay, charming even, when renting a flat here cost £300amonth and there wasn't a vast, young, jobless population. But today India is expensive even for the poorest, and it continues to project itself to foreign investors as a global powerhouse, albeit one with a fluctuating current, which means there is at least a long and prosperous career ahead for my
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local electrician, Anu Anand. President Francois Hollande of France has had a difficult fortnight, the worst since he came to office five months ago. Unemployment is soaring, factories are closing, and his popularity has plummeted. He might take comfort in the fact that November is always a sombre month in France. First there's All Saints Day to mourn the dead, followed by Armistice Day to commemorate those who died in battle. So the annual Salon du Chocle, which opened in Paris this week, the chocolate industry's most important international trade fair, is a vital weapon to fight the gloom. And President Hollande does take comfort in chocolate, particularly chocolate mousse, rather cruelly. He was once known as either the human marshmallow or flambi, after a particularly wobbly pale French custard pudding. But then he went on a crash diet and lost a dramatic three stone before Election day earlier this year. Who could now blame him for some serious comfort eating when, as Joanna Robertson suggests, French sweet shops are so very seductive?
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Mark, a lithe waiter at a busy brasserie in Montparnasse, takes a moment from twirling his tray between lunch tables, his eyes begin to shine. He's remembering something from his childhood horse sans guimi mauve, he said. Oh, I used to love those. Then, more urgently, he adds, is there anywhere around here I can buy some Orsangui Mauve are small chocolate covered marshmallow teddy bears about the size of a Paris Metro ticket but considerably plumper. They're celebrating their 50th birthday. The French, young and old, adore them. Biting into an Orson Guimauve, the French say, is like tasting Marcel Proust's Madeleine cake that launched his voyage in into the remembrance of things past. They come in milk or white chocolate, in cellophane packets from supermarkets, paper bags from small sweet shops or chic limited edition designer tins. They've just been launched on the US Market, a move that prompted some disgruntled voters to call for President Hollande long nicknamed the human marshmallow, to be Dunked in chocolate and exported along with them, the bears are predicted to make their French producers €900 million a year by 2015. Madame Cecilia Hemabissiere is in her sweet shop. I prefer Orson Luti, she says. They're almost the same, but larger. The marshmallow's firmer, creamy and slightly chewy. And they come coated in dark chocolate, which I always crave. Madame Erma Bessiere knows about sweets. Her little shop on the Rue Brea, busy with customers of all ages, has regional bonbons, chocolates and lollipops from all over the country. There are around 650 varieties of traditional sweets in France, the most for any one country in the world. Madame Erma Bessiere grew up with them. Her parents owned a patisserie, a cake shop and bakery where sweets were always sold. Sales haven't gone down, she says. If anything, they've gone up. People need a treat, and if there's something they won't do without, it's chocolate or the comfort of their favourite childhood sweet or regional speciality from home. Shelves are lined with tall glass jars filled with glistening Frou Frou bonbons, Renelle d', Orange, slices of candied orange half coated in bitter chocolate. Large cubes of rose and lemon Turkish Delight heavy with powdered sugar. Rows of amber barley sugar from Mouret and sticks of Sucre de Pomme apple sugar from Bruhan bristle temptingly beside smooth peppermint lozenges from Lord, made with holy water from the shrine and individually stamped with an image of the Virgin Mary. Opposite a small park and playground shaded by large beech trees, Georges has opened the sweet shop of his childhood dreams. We were Portuguese immigrants and didn't have much money, he says. In 1970, for my eighth birthday, an uncle gave me a five franc piece. Sweets cost one cent each, so that was a fortune. I went straight to my local patisserie and bought a huge bag full to share with my family. I burst in crying out to my mother, when I grow up, I'm going to open the best sweet shop in the whole world. Georges travels around France personally, tasting and selecting regional sweets. He hunts them down, then brings them to Paris and pops them in a jar in the window. People really appreciate it, he says. They suddenly see a rare sweet from some tiny place that they love and rush in to eat it. He has about 200 varieties, from those Orsons Guimauve to Marshmallow Petit Jesus, small marshmallow Jesuses and such fancies as Les Tine de la Reine Margaux Queen Margot's nipples, named after a beleaguered monarch notorious for her insatiable sexual appetites. Dome shaped confections of milk chocolate. Apricot raisins soaked in Grand Marnier liqueur or all coated in white chocolate with a discreet tasteful milk chocolate nipple. An ever popular gift, says Georges, to cheer up les monsieur.
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And with Joanna Robertson's graphic description of lust for chocolate, we have come to the end of this week's from our own correspondent. I hope you'll join us next week. Goodbye.