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From Our Own Correspondent
The Dry Bones of a Thousand Empires
00:28:23
Correspondents' despatches: Jeremy Bowen in Damascus reflects on the lessons a learns...
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- [00:00]
Jeremy Bowen
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]
Kate Adie
Hello.
- [00:12]
Narrator/Presenter
In today's edition, questions and more questions. Has the world missed its chance of ending the bloodshed in Syria? Will Germans opt for change in tomorrow's elections, or are they thinking safety first? Underwater tourism, what is it? And will it help Turkey with its Kurdish problem? And can one really learn Danish without taking lessons and without consulting a grammar book? The international chemical weapons watchdog says Syria has not yet provided it with full details of its arsenal of its poison gas and nerve agents. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said it was expecting further disclosures ahead of the deadline later today. Syria must also reveal details of its storage, production and research sites. Otherwise it faces sanctions from the United Nations. Meanwhile, a senior minister in Damascus has been suggesting that his government is now ready to propose a ceasefire. Jeremy Burns spent the last few weeks in the Syrian capital.
- [01:14]
Jeremy Bowen
I went to Damascus thinking I'd be there while the Americans were bombing the city. So it was strange a few Fridays ago to be standing in the sun in the square next to the western gate of the Umayyad Mosque, being offered a glass of freshly squeezed pomegranate juice. The juice squeezer scraped flakes off a great block of ice into a glass, poured the foaming pink juice on top and presented it with a gappy grin. He was a man in his 50s, without many teeth left, standing proudly behind his cart and his heap of pomegranates in a patch of shade that left by an ancient wall. He refused to take any money. The juice was delicious, by the way, just sharp enough. Because it was Friday, most of the shops in the souks and khans of the Old City were closed. The muezzin was chanting from the mosque special readings that precede the call to the noon prayer. Children ran around feeding pigeons, playing games, while boys not much older were selling bunches of balloons through the gate of the mosque. The worn stone paving inside the courtyard shone in the sun like a limestone sea. It was before the Russians and the Americans agreed their plan to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons. President Obama was still trying to persuade the U.S. congress to authorize military action, but that square in the heart of a city that has been inhabited for something like 5,000 years, seemed to be shrugging off the hourly news updates on Obama's war drums. Was it because Damascus has seen so much? I don't just mean more than two years of civil war. In 1869, Mark Twain wrote that Damascus has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies. I think cities do generate collective memories which help their peoples think through crises. But I could hear the civil war mixing with the hypnotic calm cadences coming from the mosque. The Syrian army was shelling the suburbs controlled by the rebels, as it does every day. The noise of outgoing fire from the batteries on Mount Kassyoun, which rears up over Damascus, rumbled across the city. It's been going on for so long now that everyone except the unfortunates who are in the target zone barely notices. Is not as if Damascus is a normal city. If the measure of normal is the way it was before the civil war, then it is deeply abnormal. The first time I went to a war In El Salvador, 25 years ago, I saw men selling tomatoes a few streets away from urban battlegrounds. I wondered if that made it any less of a war and whether I should include the tomato sellers in my report. What I realize now, many wars later, is that human beings are supremely adaptable, still have to live and to eat and to love, and matters have to get very desperate before they stop trying to do those things. It is easier to keep going in Damascus proper, inside the gates of the old city, in the Ottoman streets outside the walls, and in the modern shopping centers and suburbs that are all controlled by the regiment. Very little of that has been physically damaged by the war, though by now every family has been affected. On previous trips to Syria, I was able to slip over the front line to the suburbs controlled by the rebels, to step into a different world. Even a year ago, there were streets entirely blocked by the rubble of collapsed buildings. Many civilians had fled, becoming part of what is now more than 2 million Syrian refugees outside the country and over 4 million displaced inside it. Medical facilities for the wounded were pitiful and terrifying. I watched a man whose feet had been blown away by a rocket having what was left daubed with iodine by two dentists. Now the front lines are too solid, too raked by snipers, too hard even to approach, let alone cross. The main issue in Syria is the civil war. That is what has killed so many people. Chemical weapons have been part of it, but only a very small part. Yes, without a deterrent against their use, they might have been used more, and in the future. But sitting in Damascus while so much diplomatic energy was poured into getting rid of chemical weapons made me think they just weren't going far enough. Stopping the war End. Ending the agony of millions. Closing the gusher of blood needs to be the priority now. It might just have been possible two years ago. It's still worth trying. There's talk of a ceasefire, but powerful forces have been unleashed which may have to run their course.
- [06:05]
Narrator/Presenter
And that was Jeremy Bowen. The Germans go to the polls tomorrow. It's likely no party will win enough seats in the Bundestag to command a majority. So another coalition is on the way. That that's how it's been in every post war parliament and nobody thinks it'll be different this time. Much of the campaigning has been about the economy. German finances, we know, have been in a better state than in most European nations. But there's still economic pain in parts of the country. Steve Evans, who's just been to Schleswig Holstein in the north, has been talking to one lady who's been struggling to make ends meet.
- [06:42]
Steve Evans
I was walking along the quay on the Baltic port of Flensburg last Saturday, one of those early morning walks, listening to the eagle swooping and squawking over the remains of Friday nights in a port town. As I strolled, I saw a lady, by all appearances respectable, down at heel, but middle class. She was working her way down the front, rummaging in waste bins for discarded bottles to take back to the shop to reclaim the 8 cent deposit. Hard work for the equivalent of sixpence. We got talking and I asked her how the economy was going. Die Wirtschaft ist ganz ok, she said. The economy is completely ok. I asked her politely, why, if the economy was so good, was she out and about early in the morning, collecting bottles from bins? And out came a tale of woe. Heart disease, bills to pay. In Germany, despite the impression of a strong economy, there are more and more people struggling. The country is a tremendous exporter, but it's easier to sell your goods abroad if pay at home stays low. Since 1999, German average earnings have risen by 23%, compared with nearly 50% in Britain. But what interested me was that here was a woman scavenging for pennies, even as she asserted that the economy was going well and without any hint of anger or resentment. Partly her answer was German. The economy is doing well. I may be up to my neck in debt, but the economy is doing well. But it's also, I think, a genuine belief that Germany and Germans have pulled themselves out from the rubble of war and nothing should now jeopardize that. Flensburg is right on the northern border. It's on the eastern coast of that neck of land which leads to Denmark. It is charming. Unlike Kiel down the coast which was flattened, Flensburg wasn't bombed heavily. One theory is that it was spared because of its large Danish speaking German community. Maybe Flensburgers are quiet people on the edge of the country. Indeed they make a virtue of their quietness. The town has a brewery and I can testify to the quality of its beer. The brewery also makes very good TV adverts displaying the well known German sense of humour. One of them plays on that quietness. It has three locals sitting in a bar and there are lots of bars in Flensburg like there are in any port city. These three men, in a variation on an old but good joke, say nothing as they brood over their beer. At which point a brash American enters and joins the non conversation. He says, you know what? It takes me three days to drive from one end of my farm to the other. There is a silence finally broken by one of the quiet men who says, I used to have a car like that. It is Flensburg. Taciturnity, unshowy, not rich, but not envious of big time wealth either. It may be a German trait. Recently I went to another border town in Germany, to Schwtz on the Polish border. People there told me it was very hard hit by the fall of communism. This was a poor town, but to my mind, knowing parts of the post industrial South Wales valleys, Schweit seemed pretty well appointed in Germany. The east is rising. One business magazine recently named Magdeburg the most dynamic city in Europe. Magdeburg, with its magnificent medieval cathedral, Magdeburg, which employed 46,000 people in factories making machines under communism, but only 2,000 shortly after communism collapsed. One East German told me how when he worked in a factory in the old communist DDR they would bounce an irregular rubber ball hard on the floor to see where it finally landed, knowing that the search would invariably reveal a secret hoard of scarce nuts or bolts which someone had stashed away. Those days of scarcity are gone. There is discontent in Germany, but deep down they weigh that against the trauma that once was. Safety first is inscribed in their hearts and also, I suspect on their ballot papers.
- [11:55]
Narrator/Presenter
Steve Evans there. The Turkish authorities say their new and hugely ambitious water scheme known as GAP, will transform the South east of their country. The 22 dams and 19 power plants being built on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers will they maintain double the amount of the country's irrigated farmland and bring huge benefits to an impoverished population, much of which is Kurdish for decades, Turkey has been wrestling with its Kurdish problem. More than 40,000 lives have been lost in battles between the PKK, Kurdish separatist group, and the Turkish army. But now a peace process brokered by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is underway, and fighters from the PKK are withdrawing to Iraqi Kurdistan. But Diana Dark says the process is a fragile one, and it's not yet clear whether the huge Gap project is helping or hindering.
- [12:50]
Kate Adie
Soraya, a mature, stylish teacher from Istanbul, is one of a steady trickle of cosmopolitan Turks now venturing cautiously eastwards. She wants to explore the other half of her own country. I had no idea it was so civilized, she tells me as we sample an exotic lakeside breakfast at the half submerged village of Halfiti. My friends thought I was crazy to come this far east. They said I would hate it. But I love it, she says, putting her bare, bejewelled arm maternally round young Zafar, our beaming Kurdish host. Yes, we are learning to understand each other, he affirms. We have just enjoyed an early morning boat ride to Rhumkale, a mighty Byzantine fortress on the Euphrates now stranded on an island by flooding. Drowned in the valleys all around lie hundreds of other sites, their archaeological treasures lost, stolen or transferred hastily to local museums. Flooding is not a new phenomenon in eastern Turkey. It began with the epic deluges described in the stories of Gilgamesh and Noah. Though unlike those cataclysms of nature, today's version the equally epic Gap project has been decades in the planning. The Turkish government hopes it will redress the balance in living standards between the poverty stricken Kurdish southeast provinces and the wealthier Western ones by bringing employment and prosperity. You must be so pleased, I say to Zafar, with all this development helping your restaurant business. I am one of the lucky ones, he tells me. Land values have tripled since 2000, and I own this place. But many do not own the land they farm. Agha's wealthy landlords own it. They get big government payouts when their land is flooded. You mean the Kurdish farmers get nothing? I ask. Nothing, he repeats. Some have lost everything. The government must sort out property rights and compensation for us as well. And this boom has made bride prices shoot up. Don't worry, laughs Soraya. Next year I'm coming back to get a job at one of the private schools. Maybe I'll bring my teenage daughter with me. Further east, in the Tigris Gorge, at the ancient city of Hassan Caif, I sit with Koby, a gloomy Kurdish cafe owner whose livelihood will shortly disappear under 70 metres of water. When the controversial Ilusu Dam is completed, they tell us there will be underwater tourism, he grumbles, so people can still see the historic bridge and monuments. But why do we need all these dams? This is just Ankara's way of blocking the valleys where the PKK used to infiltrate and displacing us from our land. We have too much water already. Perversely, while some have too much water, others have too little. Downstream, in the broken jigsaws of Iraq and Syria, whose Kurds are also striving for autonomy, gap, according to UN sources, has already led to a 40% reduction in water flow. The recent exodus of Syrian Kurds into Iraqi Kurdistan was driven not just by fighting, but by lack of water. Turkey, controller of the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, can turn the tap off or on. More difficult to control are its Kurds, some 10 to 12 million of them. And growing Kurdish birth rates are legendary. When Erdogan says he wants every Turk to have three children, Kobe continues, his message is really more subtle than that. For Western Turks who are frightened to have even one or two, he wants them to raise it to three. But for us Kurds, who often have eight or more, he wants us to bring it down to three. Otherwise, he thinks, what can they all do when they grow up, except join the pkk? If Erdogan isn't careful, he goes on, he may accidentally help us to unite with our Syrian and Iraqi brothers. If he ignores our grievances, he will regret it. Have you looked at a map? Most of the oil wells in Turkey, Syria and Iraq are in our Kurdish territories. And most of the water, I add softly. His troubled face breaks into a smile. You know, we could be a model for the Middle east, he goes on. We are not fanatics like those crazy jihadis trying to take over in Syria. Kurdish Islam is not the Islam of Saudi Arabia or Iran. In Iraqi Kurdistan, our schools teach all world religions equally. As I wave goodbye to Kobe and to Hassan Kaif before it vanishes forever, I can't help thinking that a whole flood of Western Turks like Soraya will need to come quickly to the east to understand their Kurdish countrymen better and to save Turkey's fragile peace process with the Kurds. Otherwise, not just the landscape but the entire regional map may be reshaped by the most powerful weapon of all water.
- [17:30]
Narrator/Presenter
That's Diana Darke now. Unearthing the past is a constant fascination, whether it involves an ancient city below the waves or just a metal detector A gold coin and a farmer's field. This weekend, amateur historians, archaeologists and aviation experts are poring over the wreckage of a Second World War German bomber that they've just removed from a cave in the French Pyrenees. Chris Bockman's been following the story and tells us that for the historians it's an exceptional find. But some of the, it seems, aren't that keen on digging up the past.
- [18:05]
Chris Bockman
It's a long drive over gravel and dirt roads in the Pyrenees through the mist. Finally, more than a thousand meters up, I reach my destination. And I feel I've either joined the flickering embers of an all night rave party or a group of hardcore forest environmentalists. The men look haggard, bundled up against the early morning cold. There are shabby tents bunched on the rare patches of dry earth and lots of heavy machinery on the ground. While coffee brews on a makeshift stove. The remains of a cassoulet sit on the bottom of a large pan. This is the select French world of Second World War plane wreckage investigators. About 50 of them are here retrieving the remains of a German bomber. The dreaded Dornier 2001700 were built. None remains intact today. This particular salvage operation is intriguing. The Germans had stationed many of their Dorniers outside the French city of Toulouse, from where they conducted bombing runs on Allied forces at sea. However, in July 1944, two of these bombers got lost on their return to base and collided over the Pyrenees mountains. The eight crew members were killed instantly. But the mountains were also home to passeurs, members of the resistance who helped smuggle Allied troops over the peaks and into relative safety. In Spain. Local people feared reprisals from the Germans who would come looking for the bodies. So they decided to throw the wreckage down a nearby 100 meter cave hole to hide the evidence. And then, for decades to come, a collective unofficial silence descended on the community. Today's plane wreckage hunters are a mixed bag, including archaeologists and historians. Many, though, come from the aerospace industry themselves working for manufacturers like Airbus or the turboprop maker atr. You could say they have aviation in the blood. Gilles Collivery is one of the most determined members of the group. It was word of mouth and long forgotten rumors that sent him trekking through the forest last year in search of this remote cave. Its location matched eyewitness accounts of the crash, but it was inaccessible. So he asked a local speleologist group to help him discover what might be at the bottom of the cave. And sure enough, they stumbled on large charred metal sections of one of the lost Dorniers like most things in France, it took months of haggling and bureaucratic paperwork to get the official permission they needed to start retrieving the wreckage. It proved a complex operation, requiring makeshift cranes, harnesses and muscle power. Many of the parts weigh more than 50 kilos each, and pulling them up a narrow 100 meter shaft was far from easy. Out in the open, much of the wreckage looks like mundane scrap metal, but some pieces bring their history back to life. The wing sections, remains of an oxygen tank, ammunition, and one cockpit part. With German instructions still intact, the team say what they have found is relatively well preserved. It will all end up in museums in Berlin and southern France. But there's not enough to consider rebuilding the plane. And in fact, one reason why there are no complete Dorniers today is because after the war, their metal fuselages were recycled for other industrial needs. This team celebrated its success with their makeshift lunch, provided by the owner of an aviation themed restaurant near the airport control tower in Toulouse. He's an amateur pilot, but too old to go down a cave on ropes. Instead, he rustled up a beef stew with mustard sauce followed by chocolate brownies, all washed down with local strong red wine. Yet not everyone is happy to see this history brought to light. The mayor of the nearby village of Sakoue, Yvette Compagn, has lived there all her life. She remembers her grandparents talking about how scared they were when the two bombers crashed and seen the crew's bodies scattered over a wide area. The last thing they wanted then was to attract attention, and even now there was no local ceremony to mark the recovery of the wreckage. In her words, the Germans were the enemy after all. If it had been a British plane that was being salvaged, be a different story. The local hunters out searching for wild boar also seemed uncomfortable at the sight of these outsiders digging up the past. But one of the elderly plane hunters, Georges Josien, a former pilot in the French Air Force and a test pilot for Airbus, sees it differently. He says the unearthing of the wreckage will help him put himself in the place of the German pilots and let him understand what what really happened in the skies over this mountain range nearly 70 years ago.
- [23:15]
Narrator/Presenter
Chris Bockman in Toulouse Correspondents arriving at a new posting usually make an effort to master the local language. Some buy all the available books and sign up for online seminars. Others head off to college when they're not hard at work reporting. Of course, the success rate is, I'm afraid, rather mixed. Many don't get much beyond la plume de matante level, especially if their foreign posting's only a short one. Emma Thomas is a BBC producer who moved to Denmark last year. She's been wondering whether it's possible to pick up a new language without any formal learning.
- [23:51]
Emma Thomas
When I arrived in Copenhagen, I was already grappling with learning Romanian, a not uncomplicated language, and my future husband's native tongue. Danish would be my third foreign language, and I decided to give myself a break and see how much I could pick up in a year without taking any classes or reading any grammar books, just using a simple process of osmosis, the way we all used to hope that by leaving our textbooks under our pillows at night, we could absorb their contents effortlessly. The first thing I noticed was the frequency with which the Danes used the word men meaning, but it seemed to pop up in every other sentence, suggesting the Danes could be a rather hesitant bunch, though careful might be a better way of putting it, since they're actually a very can do people. There were also the visual cues that I'd see on my cycle route into the city. I began noticing a decided preponderance of signs displaying Clinik for foot therapies, foot clinics. Perhaps this nurturing of their feet was one reason that the Danes are so contented as a nation, I thought. And since bikes can easily be put on trains here, I started slowly deciphering the regular train announcements. Here. Cantu skifta till linea f. Skifta must mean change. Some of them came with handy English translations, the only challenge being to separate haloima, dientseng, ohusketaten mil noduska e into words that might correspond to Please keep an eye on your belongings and remember to take them with you when you leave the train. There were the comedy words boghandle, bard, fart, slut, spurt, for example. The first time I saw that splashed across a shop window, I got a bit of a shock. I was amused the day I discovered the word for girl read piga girlish being pigelig. Then there was the sign proudly displaying the words coiletette, bougarie in actual fact, meaning quality construction, but looking for all the world like quality buggery. The thing about Danish for an English speaker is that of course a lot of our language has a common root. But while you begin to be able to decipher the written language a bit, the pronunciation bears no relation to the spelling. This can result in misunderstandings. Trying to explain that you visited the picturesque hamlet of Brid Breath perhaps will meet with blank incomprehension. The true version ending in a kind of vocal splodge. And just as the phonetics are a law unto themselves, so the word order also seems curiously antiquated. On roadworks you'll see here are by the wie here work we. One imagines a sort of helmeted and bearded Viking chain gang, all swinging their axes in unison. The literal translation of Danish sentence structure can result in charming English translations, such as this example from a recent trip to a museum. Melagarden is located on 18 arches of land by Lammerfjorden. From the parking ground one crosses Mllerenden, a small canal providing water to the mill, and passes a small almost forest. The present entrance to Melagarten is through the coach house. Introduction and lecture room is located in the adjoining cowhouse. Toilets are placed in the stable. It's easy to find this kind of stiff language amusing until you realise your own feeble attempts are going to sound equally comical to Danish ears. I sit on the train in my little bubble of incomprehension, hearing the by now familiar l to sounds, feeling quietly content that my system must be working because my ear is learning the sounds before I learn the grammar and I start cobbling together simple little sentences. In shops on a good day I get a tolerant smile and a reply in Danish with helpful hand gestures. More often the assistant switches immediately to English. This is why only 20% of English speakers moving to Denmark ever learn Danish. The Danes are just so good at our language and so apologetic about their own. Only 5 million of us, they say, why would you want to learn? But this self deprecation only makes me keener to start attending some language classes. For no, I'm not yet fluent. And as the doctor asks me, just as she did a couple of months, you don't understand Danish? I firmly answer, no, not yet. And find myself even more determined to master this curious Scandinavian tongue.
- [28:10]
Narrator/Presenter
Emma Thomas joining the select band of correspondents Mastering Danish. And that's it. We're back to two editions next week, so I hope you'll join us on Thursday morning as well as on Saturday. Until then, goodbye.