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From Our Own Correspondent
The Chocolate Revolution
00:27:58
Reporters' stories from around the world: why Rupert Wingfield Hayes believes North of...
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- [00:00]
BBC Radio 4 Presenter
This is a download of BBC Radio's from our own correspondent. We make one edition for the BBC World Service, but this is the version of the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
- [00:11]
Kate Adie
It's introduced by Kate Ady Today.
- [00:14]
Programme Narrator / Correspondent
The chocolate snacks fuelling a revolution in North Korea. A boy and a turtle keep each other company as the fighting goes on in Syria. The animal hunters of Burkino Faso volunteering to be eaten alive. And Mexico's latest political scandal unfolds. Building just down the road from our office, the American citizen sentenced this week to hard labor in a North Korean prison seems likely now to be used as a kind of bargaining chip in future negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang. Tour guide Kenneth BAE is said to have admitted trying to overthrow the government there. He'll probably do time in a foreigners only facility rather than in one of North Korea's notorious labor camps where prisoners are sometimes beaten and even starved to death. His sentencing follows weeks of aggressive comment from North Korea. It's threatened both South Korea and the United States with nuclear war. But Rupert Wingfield Hayes believes the sabre rattling reveals a growing insecurity among the country's ruling elite.
- [01:22]
Kate Adie
Not a week goes by without the North Korean regime appearing to commit a fresh outrage. This time it's an American tour guide sentenced to 15 years hard labour. And for what? Last month we were being threatened with nuclear war by a 30 year old despot with a bad haircut. No wonder the Western media tends to fall back on mad, bad and sad. A hermit kingdom peopled by brainwashed masses. I'm guilty of using a few myself. The images we see from Pyongyang tend to reinforce those massed ranks of soldiers goose stepping across Kim Il Sung Square in perfect unison. Groups of women factory workers weeping at the sight of their young leader. Is the adoration real or is it fear? We ask ourselves. The images build a picture of an isolated, paranoid country. Its people kept in ignorance and fear by an all powerful militarised state. But here are some other images that have come out of North Korea recently. A policewoman chastising the driver of a souped up Mini Cooper on a Pyongyang street corner. A businessman, possibly Chinese, driving through downtown Pyongyang in his Porsche Cayenne. But the most striking image I've seen recently is this. A North Korean family in a village near the Chinese border watching a South Korean TV drama on smuggled DVD. The trade in smuggled South Korean DVDs is huge. And it can mean only one thing. North Koreans are not nearly as Isolated as we tend to think they are. While I was in Seoul, I met a number of North Korean defectors. What one told me left me open mouthed in amazement. It all relates to Choco Pies. What I hear you asking are Choco pies? Well, they're a round chocolate snack filled with marshmallow. A bit like a wagon wheel, but Korean. And what does this have to do with North Korea? Well, a few years ago, South Korea set up an industrial park just across the demilitarized zone in the North Korean town of Gaesong. The factories employ North Korean workers, or they did until last month, when Pyongyang shut them down. South Korean companies were banned from paying their North Korean employees cash bonuses. So over the years, they started paying them with various food products, including Choco Pies. Instead of eating them, the employees took the Choco pies back to Pyongyang and started selling them on the black market for three to four times their original price. North Koreans, it seems, can't get enough of the capitalist confectionery. So now, to get back to our defector. We were speaking in Seoul shortly after the Gaesong industrial Park had been shut down. I called my dad to tell him there was going to be a shortage of Choco Pies and the price would be going up, he said. I told him he should go to China and buy as many as he could find, that he would make a good profit. All of this left me extremely confused. I'm sorry, I said. You just said you called your father. Where is your father? In North Korea, he said. And how did you call him? On his mobile phone, he replied as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Sorry. Your father has a mobile phone in North Korea that can receive international calls? I asked. Yes, he said. It's a Chinese mobile phone. He lives near the border so he can get on the Chinese network. And how common is this? I asked. Oh, very common. Everyone along the border has them. They need them for doing trade with China. But couldn't he get into trouble? I asked. Look, he said. There are 50,000 North Koreans crossing backwards and forwards into China to trade. There are another 100,000 living in China doing business. What's Pyongyang going to do? It couldn't survive without this trade. This is a very different North Korea from the one portrayed in Pyongyang propaganda films. It's a country where the black economy is the real economy, where bribery rather than obedience is now the means of survival. Do North Koreans still believe in the Cult of the Kim Dynasty. Perhaps many still do, but tens of thousands already know what life is like. Just across the border in China, with smuggled DVDs and Choco Pies, more are starting to glimpse what life is like in the south as well. Pyongyang's recent manufactured crisis does not speak of a regime that is strong and confident, but of one that is weak and scared of the outside world and increasingly of its own people, too.
- [06:07]
Programme Narrator / Correspondent
And that's Rupert Wingfield Hayes. Now the list of problems facing Afghanistan seems to grow by the day. It's long been known as the source of much of the world's opium. Figures released by the United nations last month said production in Helmand had actually tripled in recent years. And yet until now, Afghans haven't been major drug users. Today, though, this country, with a population of some 30 million, is thought to include a million people with serious drug problems, many of them addicted to heroin. The Afghan government, it seems, has little cash to put towards a campaign against cultivation of the opium poppy. It's also not spending a lot on drugs, education or the treatment of addicts, as Darius Bazakhan's been finding out in the capital, Kabul.
- [06:55]
Darius Bazargan
It's nearly midnight in Kabul and I'm in a dark and intimidating public park in a district called Sharanao. There are police sirens in the background, and smoke from the nearby kebab stands drifts across my field of vision. I'm hunched over my video camera, trying to focus on the small plastic package of light brown powder that the trembling hands of an 18 year old boy called Jaweed are fumbling to unwrap. Jaweed says he wants to give up heroin, and maybe he does, but not tonight. He's smoking the drugs off a piece of tinfoil. It's called chasing the Dragon. He sucks up the coils of sweet, toxic smoke through a homemade straw. My pain is gone now, he sighs. It's healed me from my forehead to the tip of my toes. This country has, of course, always grown the opium poppies from which heroin is refined. And despite promising to stamp out illegal drugs when they arrived, the British and other foreign troops sent here soon learned that destroying poppy fields made enemies of a rural population that relied on the drugs trade to survive. So they started turning a blind eye. But why would your average Afghan want to take a dangerous drug like heroin? There's the effect of 30 years of constant war, the trauma, dislocation and despair caused by ceaseless violence. Refugees fled to Iran and Pakistan and picked up the habit there of taking drugs. Then there's unemployment, more than 40% in some places, and the sense of worthlessness and uselessness it breeds, which has led many to turn to readily available narcotics. There's ignorance too. In rural areas, particularly opium and heroin are thought of as medical curals. There's the all pervading sense of insecurity. In places like Kabul, one feels constantly on edge. There are armed, frequently masked men everywhere, ad hoc roadblocks, casual violence meted out by a corrupt police force, and the real possibility of a sudden death at the hands of suicide bombers quite prepared to attack weddings, mosques, and street markets. But heroin is a killer too. The death is agonizingly slow and humiliating. If you want to see what heroin does to human dignity, take a stroll down to the Kabul River. It's a wretched place, a fetid open sewer where hundreds of ragged junkies openly congregate under bridges to take their drugs. Here, the smell of rotting food, of human waste, and the ripe, unwashed bodies of the addicted masses combine with the sweet odor of low quality heroin. The river bank is filthy and disgusting, littered with hundreds of bloodied syringes and piles of excrement. It is one of the most degrading, pitiful places I have ever seen. And it is where Jawed will end up one day if he doesn't get his act together. He said this much himself, and yet not even a stone's throw away. The hustle and bustle of normal city life continues as if the addicts simply don't exist. Back in the park, Jaweed is pulling a syringe out of his pocket. It takes him an agonizing half an hour to raise a vein, cook up his heroin, to draw his own blood, mix it with the drugs, and then re inject himself before suddenly drifting away from the world all around him. It's a mess. The night is cold. He misses the vein. Blood goes everywhere. His head slumps forward. For a minute I think he's overdosed. Black drops of blood drip off the syringe onto the dusty ground. Then he comes to. We shake hands and set off on our separate ways. But suddenly he cries out in agony. I spin around in alarm, thinking he's hurt himself. Or worse. As far as he's concerned, it is worse. He's somehow lost what remained of the gram he'd bought in a panicked state. He's scrabbling around in the dirt, trying to locate the package with the flame of his cigarette lighter. I plead with him. It's late. Jawed, please, this is a bad place. Go home. Now you don't need it. But he cares only about the missing drugs. And so that was how I left him, hunched over, fumbling and scraping at the earth, rooting about on all fours in a frenzy, like an animal. Jawid had said he wanted to kick the habit. Maybe he does. But starting tomorrow, or perhaps the next day. Not tonight, though. Tonight there is only one winner.
- [11:23]
Programme Narrator / Correspondent
Darius Bazargan. Now, you might think that volunteering to get bitten by the black fly is hardly the perfect job, but it's a vital part of the battle against river blindness. 18 million people are infected with this disease 99% of them are in Africa, and a quarter of a million have lost their sight altogether. But scientists say the disease has almost had its day. Before long, they forecast, it will cease to exist altogether. In recent years, there's been effective spraying of the rivers where the black fly, which spreads the disease, lives and breeds. There have also been improvements in the treatment available to victims. But Emily Filu in West Africa says the experts can't afford to be complacent. There may have been advances in the war against river blindness, but the black fly isn't finished yet.
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Emily Filu
The Koo Valley in Burkina Faso is one of the country's most fertile areas, a land of lush paddy fields, undulating hills, and the meandering Khu River. Yet for decades it stood empty, its inhabitants too wary to cultivate it. What kept them away is river blindness, a terrible disease transmitted by the black fly, a tiny insect that breeds in fast flowing waters. A local Burkinabe legend said that if you lived too close to the river, it would eat your eyes. Following widespread prevention efforts since the 1970s, the disease is mostly a thing of the past. In Burkina, villagers have reclaimed their land, and few remember people going blind from the disease. River blindness is now slated for global elimination by 2025, so efforts are shifting from prevention to surveillance because although the disease has gone in some countries, the flies haven't, and the risk of resurgence remains. In Bodadugu, a picturesque village on the edge of the Comwe river in southwestern Burkina, Amit Kuala Lasan, an entomologist at the University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso's capital, and local villagers Yokuba and Haruna, we are going fly hunting as we walk past mango trees and fields of millet koala, explains that the reason why surveillance focuses on flies is because in its early stages, the disease can be hard to detect in humans. In black flies, it shows up systematically. Villages like Bodadougou therefore collect the insects regularly and send them on for testing. The capture method is unusual. The flies must be alive and whole, so they are caught by hand. Using humans as bait, Koala is responsible for training, supervising, and paying local flycatchers. We've arrived on the banks of the Kumwe, and the spot is idyllic, green, sunny, with a gentle noise of running water. Basically the perfect breeding site for black flies. Does the bite hurt? I half jokingly asked Koala. You'll soon find out, he deadpans. Meanwhile, Yakuba and Haruna have wandered off to look for the perfect flycatching spots. They've brought small wooden stools with them and soon settle down. I sit with Koala, swatting nervously. I watch Yakuba roll up his trouser legs and unpack a load of plastic tubes in front of him. He picks one, opens it, and waits, scrutinizing his legs. When the flies land on his calves and shins, Yakuba scoops them in the tube. He must be quick. Flies usually bite within 10 seconds of skin contact, and despite their tiny size, less than a millimeter, they are ferocious. At the height of fly season, there are so many flies that you can only use one leg at a time, says Koala. Sometimes even just one foot. Flycatchers usually work 12 hour shifts, alternating catching and sample preparation. MDSC, the lab testing the flies in Ouagadougou and one of just three labs in the world capable of doing this work, requires 9,000 flies per site, prepared in samples of 300. Once at the lab, the flies are dried, frozen, decapitated, counted by hand, ground, and blended for testing. It is a meticulous, painstaking job, but the results are crucial to establish whether river blindness is being kept at bay. Dr. Laurentou, the lab's director, seems unfazed by the task as he rattles through the numbers. 9,000 flies per site, 10 sites per country, seven countries. For the time being, that's 630,000 flies per year. Sometimes it goes up to a million. As more countries in Africa progress towards elimination, MDSC knows there are hundreds of thousands more flies in the pipeline. Dr. Toi says they're looking into ways to mechanize the counting process. They're also working on traps. Because of the ethical concerns of using human flycatchers like Yakuba and Haruna. Even though the risk of infection is low and flycatchers receive preventative treatment, the bites remain painful. I ask Yakuba how he feels about this. We are villagers, so the money helps us in the lean season. But what we really want is to get rid of river blindness for good.
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Programme Narrator / Correspondent
That's Emily Fillou. The Americans say they're rethinking their opposition to arming the rebels in Syria. According to President Obama, they'll now look at all options to end the conflict there, but are keen to ensure their action won't make the situation more deadly or complex. This week there was more trouble on the country's border with Turkey. A group of Syrians attacked Turkish border officials and set fire to sentry boxes after being refused entry into the country. The local mayor said three Turkish police officials, two soldiers and a civilian were injured when the Syrians opened fire across the borderline. Huge numbers of refugees from the fighting in Syria have now made it across the border. James Harkins says few of them feel the fighting's going to end anytime soon.
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James Harkin
Have you ever met anyone who's met Angelina Jolie? I have, but it took a 13 year old Syrian boy to make it happen. I first ran into Saleh last summer in a barren, airless refugee camp at Turkey's border with Syria. Three months before, with the conflict gaining brutal momentum in his native Aleppo, his rebel supporting family had spirited him and most of his siblings out of the country. At the border with Turkey, they'd been ushered into one of a throng of so called container cities thrown up by the Turkish government. Out on its own and a long way from anywhere, rows and rows of dusty steel boxes sat baking in the midday heat. The place was like an open prison. Luckily, Sally took me under his wing. With a neat crop of blond hair and a razor sharp wit, the boy had grown an intelligence and a savvy far beyond his years. His clean cut American accented English also made him an ideal interpreter for someone like me. And so for most of the afternoon he'd walked me around the camp with all the confidence of a general showing off his troops. Our conversations were broken by the dull quake of mortar rounds colliding with the earth, or by Sally pointing out fresh plumes of black smoke rising from across the border. Like many Syrian children, he knew much more about weaponry than the average war reporter. We just have Kalashnikovs and RPGs, he said. But now we have some Dushkas too. I looked at him blankly. Dushka, it turned out, is the rebels borrowed abbreviation for the heavy Russian made machine guns they like to mount on the back of pickup trucks. You don't know what a dushka is? He looked at me, greatly disappointed before miming what it must be like to fire one. It's an English Word, I think. I met Sally and his family again last week, and this time the mood was more somber. Last summer, 40,000 refugees languished in seven camps along the Turkish border, just like this. Now there are five times that amount and another hundred thousand living just outside the camps and a similar number living inhabiting a kind of tented limbo just across the border. Conditions for some have improved. Last summer there were no Syrian teachers, but now Sally has lessons in Arabic, Turkish and English. English is the hardest of all. He told me it might come in handy. Over a delicious dinner of roast chicken in their container home, Saleh's father mentioned that they were thinking of emigrating. That's if anywhere we'll have them. Then Sally piped up to say that in September, the actress and UN ambassador, Angelina Jolie, had arrived in their container. She sat there for 30 minutes, he said, and spent all of it crying. Angelina Jolie hasn't been Sally's only visitor in the camp. After dinner, he stood up to say that he'd found a new friend, a turtle. I thought he might be pulling my leg, but he duly went off to fetch it and set it down on the floor, a miniature dinosaur of a thing caked with dust and looking a hundred years old. And Mr. James, said Sally excitedly, when I first found it, it looked so, so bad. But I cleaned it up and I fed it bits of fruit and now it's much, much better. And it's so, so clever. If I don't feed it for even a day, it comes and taps on the stairs of our container until I give it something to eat. The campaign to arse the Syrian regime through force of arms is moving at about the same pace as Saleh's turtle. The disparate battalions working under the banner of the Free Syrian army have made some progress in the struggle for Aleppo and the surrounding villages, but only slowly and at great cost, and only with the help of Islamic radicals like Jabar Al Nusra, whose ideology often seems indistinguishable from that of Al Qaeda. Seven members of Saleh's extended family have now been killed fighting with the rebels, including his oldest brother. The relentless rebel propaganda in much of the international media, together with morale boosting statements of support from the Gulf states and the west, encouraged these people to believe that the Ba' Athist regime of Bashar al Assad was on the brink of collapse and that they were going to help. It wasn't, and they weren't.
- [22:12]
Programme Narrator / Correspondent
James Harkin in Turkey, that hardy perennial of a topic, the abuse of power has been the subject of heated debate in Mexico this week at Centre Stage. On this occasion, not a member of the government, but one of their children. Andrea Benitez is the daughter of the man responsible for closing down restaurants which failed to adhere to public health standards. When Andrea wasn't given the table she wanted at one establishment, she used her father's name to have the place shut down. And as Will Grant explains, it's just another example of Mexico's profoundly hierarchical society.
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BBC Radio 4 Presenter
Sometimes the story lands right on your doorstep. Over the road from the BBC office is a trendy looking restaurant with black decor and wooden tables outside called Maximo Bistro. Occasionally we'd go for their set lunch menu, although it's a bit on the expensive side. Good food though. The menu includes ribeye of organic pork with porcini mushroom puree, sea bass with carrot and macadamia nut salad and seafood, and toasted garlic stuffed ravioli with fresh broad beans. You can often spy politicians and starlets of Mexican society lunching alongside you. It was in the Maximo Bistro that the country's latest political scandal unfolded. As it tends to be at the weekend, the place was packed in walks. Andrea Benitez, a wealthy 20 something, looking for a table. Told that the one she wanted wasn't available, she threw what can only be described as a tantrum and used the ace up her sleeve. Her daddy. Andrea Benitez, is the daughter of Umberto Benitez Trevino, who happens to be the federal Attorney General for Consumer Protection. Faster than you can say, do you know who I am? Andrea had called her father's department, who promptly turned up at our local neighbourhood bistro and closed it down on spurious administrative grounds. She also took to Twitter to berate the restaurant staff for what she called their dreadful service, no manners, and vowed never to go back. But it seems on this occasion, Ms. Benitez might have bitten off more than she could chew. The same method she used to besmirch the restaurant, namely Twitter, quickly came to its defence as customers began to take photos of what was happening. Once it became public knowledge, she was crowned Lady Profeco, a reference to the state agency her father runs. Most comments let the girl know in no uncertain terms that the rich and powerful should no longer consider such abuses of power a birthright. Her father called off his agents, apologized for his daughter, and gave the restaurant the green light to reopen. The episode reveals a lot about Mexico's sharply stratified society. The haves appear to assume they can treat the have nots as badly as they want, no matter how rude, disrespectful or abusive. Lady Profeco was not the first to do so. During the last presidential election campaign, the eventual winner, Enrique Pena Nieto, made a gaffe at the Guadalajara Book Fair where he was unable to name three books that had influenced him apart from the Bible. Cue a storm of criticism that the man who would be president apparently hadn't read three influential works of literature. His 16 year old daughter Paulina defended him again via Twitter, insulting his detractors as idiots and more tellingly, as prole plebs. Her Twitter account was swiftly shut down by her father's campaign team. But it's not just the offspring of the political elite who behave this way. Should you ever want to see these attitudes of superiority in action, I suggest you google the words Ladies de Polanco Polanco being an up market neighbourhood in Mexico City, There you will find a short video shot on a mobile phone of two apparently drunk women raging against a police officer for having the temerity to pull them over after their car swerved across the road. Amid the slaps and the volleys of abuse that they throw at the officer is another very revealing phrase. They call him assalariado, meaning wage earner. Somehow in the minds of these women, one of whom, it was later revealed, had appeared in a reality TV programme. Getting a fixed salary at the end of the month is something to be ashamed of. They, it seems, don't need to worry about such trivial matters like pay. Then there's the gentleman de la Lomas, as he's become known. In another high end part of the capital, the owner of a fashion company was filmed thrashing a parking attendant for saying he couldn't help him change his flat tyre because he wasn't allowed to abandon his post. The man broke the parking attendant's teeth in the beating and repeatedly called him pinche Indio damn Indian. Despite the irrefutable video evidence against the so called gentleman, he he was nothing more than mildly inconvenienced by the bad press and the court case which followed. A report came out recently which showed what most Mexicans had long there is almost no social mobility in the country whatsoever. If you are born into poverty, the chances are very high that you will die poor too. This week I met two real gentlemen, decent, polite and kind. One picks fruit in the fields outside Mexico City, the other packs bags in one of the capital supermarkets. Probably combined, they earn in a week the price of a single meal. At Maximo Bistro Andrea Benitez would do well to remember that.
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Programme Narrator / Correspondent
Will Grant with a story right on the BBC's doorstep. The expenses claim should be modest. There'll be more from our own correspondence far and wide next Saturday morning. Do join us. Goodbye.