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From Our Own Correspondent
The Battle for Aden
00:27:47
Insight, colour, context, detail. In this edition, war rips the heart out of old Aden...
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- [00:00]
A
Hello from the. From our own correspondence studios at Broadcasting House in London, you've downloaded the latest edition of the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
- [00:12]
B
Hello. Today, the schools with cemeteries but no playgrounds. Canadians face up to one of the darkest periods of their history. It's time to come home. For the British man who spent five months fighting is in Syria. Religion used to be forbidden in Russia. Today we're told it's compulsory. And we dive into the green waters off the coast of Mexico for a close encounter with a giant of the deep. But first, there's been no let up in the violence in Yemen as all sides jockey for position ahead of peace talks sponsored by the UN due to get underway in Geneva at the weekend. Saudi warplanes have continued to attack positions held by the Houthi rebels who are fighting alongside troops loyal to the country's former president and Ali Abdullah Saleh. More than 2,000 people have died since the conflict started in March. And for the civilians who are still there, caught up in the fighting, life's become increasingly desperate, as Iona Craig's been finding out. In the southern port city of Aden,
- [01:15]
C
24 year old Latifa left her husband with their 14 month old baby boy, Mansoor, and dashed out onto the street. The small family hadn't eaten for three days when word spread in the Darsa district of Aden that an aid delivery had arrived. Moments after leaving their home, just a few meters from the front line of a war that has been raging in the streets of this city for almost three months, the shelling began. Fearing for her safety, Latifa's husband ran outside, cradling his young son in his arms while the explosions closed in around him. As he rushed down the street in search of his wife, the bullet hit, tearing through the little boy's calf and into his father's stomach. Mansour now lies asleep on a hospital bed, bandages bound around the end of his right thigh. At the Medicine Saint Frontier Hospital, surgeons were unable to save his leg. His father is down the corridor lying in intensive care. In a single month, this hospital, one of four in the city still taking in trauma patients, has received 33 child casualties. The battle for control of Aden is relentless. On the one side, there are the Houthis, backed by military units loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. On the other, a ragtag militia of the anti Houthi Southern Resistance who claim no loyalty to Yemen's president and government. In exile in Riyadh, civilians meanwhile struggle to survive the conflict and ongoing Siege. The joint Houthi Saleh forces are preventing food and medical supplies from entering the city by road. And a naval blockade imposed by the Saudis and their allies, in place since their bombing campaign against the Houthis began in March, is also preventing vital food and drug supplies arriving by sea. You can see the impact of this dual blockade in the empty vegetable stands in the city's markets and the resulting soaring food prices. The cost of flour has more than trebled, with queues outside bakeries across the city. The price of a sack of potatoes, if you can find one, has gone from 7 pounds to more than 50. This daily struggle in Aden is set against the backdrop of the continuous, almost rhythmical thud of artillery fire punctuated by ground shaking airstrikes. There is no rest here from this war, not even for the dead. In the morgue of the city's largest public hospital, abandoned after it was engulfed by the conflict, the bodies of the deceased are now spilling out of the door. The smell is not just of death, but a wretch inducing stench that comes after more than a month of corpses being left out in more than 30 degrees of heat. The result is a hauntingly gruesome scene and a smell so consuming it permeates your skin. This entire city is similarly rotting, the living struggling to avoid the same fate. Its numerous hotels, once popular seaside winter retreats for thousands of Yemenis, have either been flattened by airstrikes or stand as hollow, crumbling concrete carcasses following months of shelling. Unscathed hotels behind the front lines are filled with thousands of displaced families. Phone networks have been cut to the majority of the city and the displaced are constantly shifting as the fighting spreads. In the two thirds of the city now under Houthi control, burnt out tanks and armoured personnel carriers litter the streets of the former British colony. The heart of the once bustling seaport is now a ghost town. The few who remain in the conflict ravaged districts rarely leave their homes. They know there are snipers lingering in the remnants of tall buildings. Living in sweltering heat, without electricity or fresh food. Their days revolve around one crucial a hunt for water. Malaria and dengue fever bring the prospect of more death as drugs run out. Street cleaners have not been paid since the war began. The streets have become a breeding ground for further disease as piles of waste and green pools of fetid sewage line the streets. On 14 June, the Houthis and Yemen's exile government are set to meet in Geneva for talks that many hope could eventually result in an end to a war currently being fought on at least six fronts across the country. Yet for the people of Aden, it's hard to be optimistic. We were taking our last gasp of breath before this war began. Note Surgeon Dr. Ramsay Mossen sitting outside the operating theatre in Alwali Hospital. Now this is the end.
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B
And that's Iona Craig. Canada's been forced to take a painful look into its past. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission has finally ruled on how the country's Aboriginal children were treated over a period lasting more than a century. At least 150,000 boys and girls were separated from their families as part of a forced assimilation policy. They were stripped of their language and culture and sent to church run boarding schools. There was emotional, physical and sexual abuse. The Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner spent seven years collecting evidence from thousands of people all around the country. Sian Griffiths was there as the findings were announced.
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I wriggled my way through an expectant crowd in a ballroom of a downtown Ottawa hotel. Several hundred people, among them former residential school students known as survivors, many of them now elderly, stood shoulder to shoulder with camera crews. Rarely had an Aboriginal led event attracted such national attention. While this moment was the culmination of a seven year inquiry, many survivors had waited several decades to share their stories. Many had felt such shame at the abuse that they had endured that they never told another living soul, not their families, not their friends. Until a commission arrived in their corner of Canada. The inquiry was more of an endless marathon, an odyssey. The three commissioners traveled tens of thousands of miles to hundreds of communities, even the most remote on the shores of the Arctic Ocean to hear story after story of abuse. By all accounts, the work of the commissioners was relentless, physically demanding and emotionally grueling. With the evidence now gathered, Canada was about to face a moment of reckoning. The room fell silent when Murray Sinclair, the chair of the commission and Canada's leading Aboriginal judge, approached the podium. Tall, commanding and august, his white hair seemed to have gone even whiter under the weight of the many sad stories he now carried with him. As he introduced himself, the room burst into a thunderous, deafening applause. And accentuated by energetic drumming, wolf whistling and cheering. It was the kind of welcome normally reserved for a hero returning from a difficult mission. Judge Sinclair, who described the residential school era as one of the darkest, most troubling chapters in Canadian history, began to read out his findings. More of a list of charges. He said that seven generations of children were stripped of the love of their families, their self respect and identity over the course of a century. In a deep, booming voice. He accused Canadian governments and churches of trying to erase from the face of the earth the culture and history of many great and proud peoples. He said there had been discrimination, deprivation and all manner of physical, sexual, emotional and mental abuse. His words obviously triggered painful childhood memories. All around me. People began sniffling, shedding tears and even sobbing. Counselors handed out tissues and glasses of water to the emotionally upset. It seemed that people hadn't just gathered to hear the report, but to experience a collective emotional release. Then, with two words, he issued his damning verdict. Cultural genocide. Again. The room erupted into massive applause. For them, it was a long awaited affirmation. But for many Canadians, this would be bewildering news. Weren't they, after all, the nature loving, nice guys? Judge Sinclair was showing them their dark side. But he left it to a fellow commissioner to reveal the tragic news that 6,000 Aboriginal children had died of malnutrition and disease at residential schools. Those were the ones they knew about. Many records, she said, had been destroyed. The school authorities clearly had little regard for the families. Many were never informed about the loss of their sons and daughters. Often the boys and girls were buried on school grounds, which she described as having cemeteries but not playgrounds. We can't unknow what we have learned, she said. Judge Sinclair blamed the residential school system for the dysfunction, chaos and poverty in Aboriginal communities today. They face high crime, addiction and unemployment rates and poorer than average prospects in health and education. With the truth out now came the reconciliation justice. Sinclair laid down 94 recommendations, really preconditions to true reconciliation. Though one of them called for a formal apology from the Pope, Many of the schools were Catholic run. Most urged Canada's political leaders to commit to closing the gap between aboriginal and non aboriginal Canadians. Thus far, the government has agreed to just one. However, in a sure sign that an election is looming, opposition parties agreed, if elected, to implement all the recommendations. One of the key demands is that this shameful chapter of Canadian history be taught as a mandatory subject in all Canadian schools. No doubt, one key date students will never forget will be the day Judge Sinclair made Canadians face up to their past.
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Sian Griffiths In Ottawa, the fighters of so called Islamic State have been marking the first anniversary of their capture of Mosul, Iraq's second city. They've kept their grip on the city despite attacks by Iraqi ground forces and US warplanes. The group has, however, lost some ground in its clashes with Kurdish militias in Syria. And dozens of foreign fighters, including a number of British men, are now leaving the Middle east and heading home. Quentin Somerville has been talking to one of them who made it back to Britain yesterday without being stopped and questioned by the authorities. The government had warned that people who travelled to Iraq or Syria could face prosecution.
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It was how he ate his boiled egg that gave away the fact that Harry had been gone for a while. He picked it up out of the egg cup and was about to tap it on the table to break the shell and peel it with his hands. He stopped. I'm eating my egg like a curd, he said. Then he put it back in the cup, lopped off the top and set about the runny insides with a teaspoon, just like a good Englishman. Harry is from Cambridge, but has been for the last five months fighting the Islamic State in Syria. I'd first met him there alongside the Kurdish YPG militias, right on the front lines. Now we were having breakfast together in a smart hotel in northern Iraq. Harry was getting ready to go home. When we met in the spring, I didn't rate his chances as a fighter. He was a former currency trader with no military experience. Tall and slim, his curly haired head would stick out a mile in northeastern Syria. And what is would have done to get their hands on 28 year old, terribly well mannered Harry? Having beheaded most of their Western hostages, they needed more. He changed over the last few months and the video footage on his mobile phone helped explain why. There's Harry firing a Dragunov sniper rifle at the enemy. Next he's riding on the back of a pickup truck as tanks charge forward on either side. Then there are coalition airstrikes landing close by on Islamic State positions. Off camera, Harry and his fellow fighters whoop and scream with delight. But it's not all Boy's own adventure stuff. There are the rotting corpses of IS soldiers killed in battle, a 15 year old with his brains literally blown out. And there are pictures of the hard life, stale bread, terrible rations and plagues of flies. The night before was his first time in a proper bed in as long as he could remember. He'd grown thinner over the past few months. Those bad rations and hours of marching and fighting did that. He still has a passion bordering on naivety for freedom, democracy and so on, though perhaps a little less fervent these days. After all, he is, he said, tired now. Bone tired. So it was, he told me, time to go home. The Kurdish People's Protection Unit, as the YPG are known, had regained hundreds of miles from the Islamic State. Admittedly, much of this was in sparsely populated areas. There was a lull in the Fighting and Harry and the other foreigners I met Americans, a New Zealander, another Brit all admitted they were bored. Was he treating this like a gap here? I asked. No, replied Harry. He'd seen friends die and been as little as 20 metres from is at some points, and he'd taken part in wave after wave of attacks that in the end failed to dislodge the Islamic State from a village. An extra pair of hands was useful on the battlefield, whether foreign or local, he said. But there were plenty of local Kurds or Arabs willing to take up arms against IS Foreign fighters brought something else. International attention to the Kurdish cause and the battle against the Islamic State. For Harry and his fellow foreigners, the increased number of airstrikes in the past few months have partly been as a result of the intensified focus on the struggle. When Kurds join the fight, it isn't news. When we come, people are interested, said Harry's friend Jack. He's 22 and from Bournemouth, baby faced. I'd last met the former IT worker in a hospital in Syria. He'd been shot in the arm. Now he had a little pink scar. Two small bumps, not quite the battle scar he'd hoped for. Jack, too, was going home. Britons are warned against traveling to Iraq and Syria, and certainly warned against joining the conflict whichever side they choose, although the Prime Minister, David Cameron, has made plain that he sees a difference between those who fight for IS and those who take up arms against it. Jack had been stopped on his way to join the war. He was taking an Iraqi Airways flight. I was the only white face on it. He giggled, and police stopped him before he boarded. He told them his intention was to travel to Syria and join a foreign war. They let him go regardless. Harry had a nervous flight home, but at Heathrow he sailed through the border checks and wasn't stopped making it back safely. He said, maybe they don't think I'm a terrorist. I went to help people. It's not controversial.
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B
Quentin Somerville Moscow has no shortage of enormous statues erected in honor of its most important people. The larger than life statues, of course, went up as the subject star was on the rise. But often as not, they were taken down again when it waned. From the likeness of Lenin, who now looks out at a burgher king, to the massive statue of Peter the Great on a sailing vessel in the Moscow River. Each is a wordless symbol of the politics and orthodoxies of the day. Caroline Wyatt has been following the controversy in Moscow surrounding plans by the Orthodox Church and the Russian government to put up a statue of St. Vladimir, Russia's patron saint, on hills overlooking the capital.
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The sun is just starting to set over Moscow State University when I meet the best dressed Communist I've ever seen. She's in a pale grey pinstriped suit with the natural poise of a ballet dancer, her long brown hair greying at the temples, tied back in a neat bun. Her name is Yelena Shuvalova and she's a member of Moscow City Parliament. She's surrounded by a small but earnest crowd of students and professors. They want to know how to protest against St. Vladimir, or rather an enormous statue of St. Vladimir, which will dominate the city skyline not far from this temple of science and learning. Russia's patron saint is due to go up later this year, unless they can stop him. Vladimir the Great, or the Grand Prince, was a warlord who became the first Russian ruler to convert to Christianity in the late 900s, before insisting that his people did the same. That was the beginning of the Russian Orthodox Church. St. Vladimir also happens to be the man who successfully besieged his own brother in Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine, and he is that country's patron saint as well. This gathering outside the university is emphatically not a demonstration, as the students make clear, because that would require official permission. It's simply a meeting about the possibility of protesting. So what exactly is it that Jelena has against Russia's patron saint? She looks at me with shrewd blue eyes and a half smile. For a start, he'll be more than 25 metres tall and he'll stand on a hill overlooking the whole of Moscow, obscuring a fine view of the city and in turn, the city's view of the State University itself. That building is breathtaking, One of Stalin's seven Gothic skyscrapers, built in the 1950s using slave labour, designed to show the world the might of Soviet Soviet man, able to create a building so tall that it pierced the very heavens. The Communists had already banished God by then. So, no objections on the grounds of religion or politics, then? I ask, thinking back to the 1930s, when Stalin had the city's most imposing Orthodox cathedral blown up. That cathedral has risen again, rebuilt on the same site, its burnished domes a symbol of a Russian Orthodox church, once again enjoying a close relationship with the Russian state. Some would say too close. Oh, no, no religious objections, says Jelena. Purely architectural. It's the right statue in the wrong place. And Yelena's young assistant adds, the geologists say St Vladimir would make the whole area on the crest of the hill very unstable. In Fact, she adds, if St. Vladimir topples, he could take the whole university with him and hurt a lot of people. I don't quite understand. So I walk away from the university until the enormous Soviet star at the top is just a tiny silhouette against the golden evening sky. I turn to my friend Svetlana as we look at where the statue will stand on Sparrow Hills and then across to the city skyline, where the gold and silver onion domes of the churches jostle with the new skyscrapers, the temples to mammon built by today's Russian rich. The students and Jelena say they have no political or religious objections to the statue. Are you sure that's right? I ask her. Svetlana looks at me as though I were a particularly dim child. There are some things that you just can't say, she tells me with a smile. And these days it's true, Russians hesitate to criticise the church too loudly. Not least with new anti blasphemy laws allowing harsh punishment for those offending religious feeling, even the opposition Communist Party is rehabilitating God and the Orthodox Church as it seeks voters. Christianity is well and truly back as part of Russia's new national identity, and today Russia's patron saint has become a rather useful figure for staking a wider political claim the Kremlin's present day goals in Crimea and Ukraine A few months ago, President Vladimir Putin spoke of Crimea almost as Russian holy ground, with the peninsula he annexed from Ukraine last year now portrayed as the spiritual source of the new Russian state, with Crimea the place where St. Vladimir was baptized before converting his people. Although Kiev still prefers to think of St. Vladimir and the Crimea as its own. I think of another conversation I'd had about the statue with my friend Alexei the day before. He was firmly against it. I'm an atheist, he told me. I believe in science, not superstition or saints. In the old days under the Communists, we weren't allowed to believe in God. Religion was forbidden. These days it's compulsory. Perhaps the authorities will heed these quiet voices of protest and the pleas for a smaller St. Vladimir and a more stable vantage point. But if the Orthodox Church and a popular president, who also happens to go by the name Vladimir Vladimirovic, have their way, nothing will obstruct the statue itself or the year of commemorations to mark the thousandth anniversary of St. Vladimir's death.
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That's Caroline Wyatt. Now, ever since the famous undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau called it the Aquarium of the World, the Sea of Cortez off Mexico's Baja Peninsula has attracted divers, game fishermen and marine scient. It's home to the biggest fish in the sea, as well as the world's smallest and rarest porpoise. Tim Ecot donned flippers and goggles and dived in to try to understand the conservation efforts underway to protect this remarkable environment.
- [22:47]
A
Five minutes from the dock at La Paz, we saw the first whale shark. Easily as long as our little diving skiff, its tail fin cut through the green water and its elegant body was a great dark shadow below the surface. Our skipper, Javier Oleicea, has fished and dived these waters all of his life, and he assured me we would see more sharks before the day was over. But first he wanted to show me other things. A colony of thousands of blue footed boobies chattering on a mushroom shaped rock where herons and ospreys fought to find a nesting spot. And then to the little outcrops of Los Islotes, where Californian sea lions nurse their pups in the early summer sun. Snorkeling, I was joined by these golden haired sirens, swooping, somersaulting and blowing bubbles as they passed within a hand's breadth of me. Free diving down a few meters brought them closer. Curious that a slow moving, clumsy land animal like me could do anything other than float at the surface. Large males with domed foreheads as big as basketballs circled further away and on the alert to any danger to their offspring. Javier took our little boat on a complete circuit of nearby Espiritu Santo island, A nature sanctuary of dramatic sandstone cliffs and deep bays where pelicans dived for their lunch. We were joined by a school of several dozen long beaked common dolphins, tail slapping and cartwheeling as they herded some unseen prey below the glittering surface. Then there were bottlenose dolphins too. And yellow finned tuna jumping. I asked Javier if he'd ever seen a baquita. There are fewer than a hundred of these tiny porpoises left alive, most of them further north in the Gulf of California, where they often get tangled up in fishing nets. In recent weeks, the Mexican president, Enrique Pena Nieto, has launched a new initiative, and more practically, patrol boats, to try to save this unique creature, which is little more than a meter long and little understood. Javier said that in his lifetime he'd only ever seen two. La Paz, from where we set out, is very much a seaside resort. A long esplanade, the Malecon, is adorned with nautical sculptures. There's a giant pearl in a clamshell, testament to when pearling was a lucrative industry here. More than a century ago. There are bronze dolphins, manta rays and even litter bins in the shape of sea lions. With mouths agape and clutching a diving mask, a bronze Jacques Cousteau stares out across the bay. Tourism is growing, though it's mainly Mexican visitors who populate La Paz. It's very different from the glitzy resorts of Los Cabos, two hours south by road, where villas are owned by a lineage of Hollywood royalty that stretches from Frank Sinatra and to George Clooney. La Paz is not Los Cabos, and the residents say that that's not the kind of development they want. The marine treasures here are the draw, not golf clubs or luxury spas. James Curtis, a naturalized Mexican, set up the Cortez Club diving school here more than 20 years ago. It's well known internationally by wildlife filmmakers as the place to come to see whale sharks and schooling hammerheads and giant Pacific manta rays. He's seen a massive shift in local attitudes to the marine environment. He introduced a reward system to fishermen who notify the club when they spot sharks. That, he said, is more lucrative than selling the shark meat. As the afternoon sun turned the peaks of the Sierras along the coast to burnt ochre, Javier delivered his promise. In the lee of a sandbank called El Magote, he told me to get ready to jump overboard. Trustingly, I slipped into the plankton green water. Javier cut the engine and I was face to face with the giant coming towards me. I saw the distinctive flat head, as long and as wide as a family dining table and ending in a slit mouth more than a meter across. The a lazy stroke of the elegant tail, and I was finning as hard as I could to keep up. I measured my own body against the shark and safely estimated the fish to be just shy of 8 meters. Javier found me four more individuals in the space of half an hour, their delicately patterned skin covered in dots that could have been made with tennis balls dipped in white emulsion. And those mysterious retractable eyes on the sides of their heads were a magnificent sight, the stuff of my Baja dreams.
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And with Tim Eckhart swimming with sharks off the coast of Mexico, we've reached the end of another edition, but we're back with more dispatches from around the world on Saturday morning at half past eleven. I hope you'll join us. Goodbye.