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From Our Own Correspondent
The Heaviest Coffin
00:27:51
Story-telling from the world of news and current affairs. In this edition: Shaimaa on...
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Thank you for downloading the latest edition of BBC Radio's from our own correspondent, the best in news and current affairs storytelling. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Hello. Today, the smallest coffins are the heaviest. In Peshawar, the grieving goes on. Get the next plane out. But for many, there's no flight to safety as the Islamic State militants march on. In western Iraq, we smoke cigars and drink rum with the ladies Smoking club of Havana as the US and Cuba find shake hands and from the vast lost centre of France, a tale of kings, queens and chocolate biscuits. Pakistani security forces have been stepping up operations against the Taliban after the militants attack on a school in Peshawar on Tuesday in which nearly 150 people were killed, most of them children. Officials say that in one operation in the country's northwest, at least seven Jihadis and two Pakistani soldiers were killed. In another assault in North Waziristan, near the Afghan border, a US drone strike is believed to have killed at least five militants. In Peshawar itself, funerals and burials of the dead took place as schools, businesses and markets closed in mourning. Last night there was a candlelit vigil outside the school. Our correspondent Shaima Khalil has sent us this dispatch.
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You didn't need to see the pools of blood in every corner of the school auditorium to know that a massacre had taken place there. A thick smell hit you as you went in. The eerie silence of the shocked adults looking at the remnants of the children's belongings strewn around itself told a devastating story. Almost every row of seats in the school hall bore a similar picture of horror. The blood splattered textbooks, the school shoes left behind in a desperate attempt to escape. Scattered bits of paper on which you could see the children's handwriting. This is where the Taliban gunmen stormed in and shot more than 100 pupils at close range. The students were in the hall learning about first aid when the attack happened. One corner of the room bears scorch marks. That's where the militants set fire to one of the teachers. When I arrived at the Lady Redding Hospital where many of the victims were taken, I could see a group of parents and family members gathering in front of a wall, pushing to get to the front. A list of names had been stuck up there, names of the dead and injured. As the day went on, the list grew longer and the crowd around it grew bigger. All of them desperate to find out what had happened to their loved ones. In the hospital's intensive care unit, I found 13 year old sage lying on a bed, his family next to him. He was still too Shocked to talk about what had happened. His mother, Nahida, is a teacher at the school. She told me Saeed had hidden under a chair and called her as the attack began. I heard everything. She told me. My son was on the phone. He said, I'm shocked. Please come and get me. And I didn't know how to reach him. As a mother, I can't describe to you what I felt. She told me through her tears, adding, but Alhamdulillah, thank God he's now here with me. But many other parents are having to live with the fact that their loved ones are not coming back. Like the awan family, whose 14 year old son Abdullah was shot in the face during the attack. At the family home, the female relatives gathered around the boy's body, which was lying in an open coffin. He was covered in flowers and I could clearly see the bullet mark on his face. His mother sat on the floor weeping, wiping his forehead, holding his hand, still calling out his name. This was a family gripped by grief, wailing relatives, small children looking on in disbelief. At the local graveyard, the male relatives recited verses from the Quran and prayed for Abdullah before laying him to rest. He was a top student, his uncle told me he loved birds. He had a couple of them at home and one of them laid eggs. He was counting the days for them to hatch. But now he's gone. After the funeral, I talked to the boy's father about his loss. He's now with Allah, the man said. And I have to be patient. I don't feel anything now. All these people are around me. They're supporting me. But he added, it will hit me tonight when I am in bed all alone. In the days after the attack, the crowds gathering at the school gate grew larger and larger. The gates began to resemble a shrine with roses, marigolds, candles and placards. There were messages of grief and solidarity. The smallest coffins are the heaviest, one sign said. My boy was my dream, and my dream was shot dead, said another. A group of teenagers from the army public school was gathering there. They came dressed in their uniforms. Akif Azim, one of the senior students, still had some spots of blood on his jacket. He'd survived the attack, but told me how he'd seen many fellow students die in front of him. I've been going from one funeral to another, he said. I haven't slept for two days. So could he face going back to school after what had happened? I wondered. That's why I came here today dressed in my uniform, he told me. It's a message to those who carried out the attack. You can take my friends, you can take my teachers, but I am still here in my uniform, and I will go back to school.
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Shaima Khalil in Peshawar, President Obama talked in his end of the year speech last night about the decision to improve relations with Cuba. He believes that ending the island's 50 years of isolation won't bring about immediate change. The government in Havana, he said, was still repressing its citizens. But the thaw in relations did provide a chance for a different outcome. The historic move was welcomed in capitals around the world. At a Latin American summit in Argentina, the presidents of Colombia, Venezuela and Peru all praised the courage of Presidents Obama and Castro. But in the United States, senior Republican senators called the move a retreat by America, and some exiled Cubans in Florida reacted with anger and dismay. Barbara Pletascher is just back from a visit to Havana.
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I'm intrigued by the reaction when I tell people I've spent a month in Cuba. You must have had a fabulous time, they say dreamily, as if talking about a Caribbean paradise. Well, I certainly had some fabulous moments, such as my afternoon smoking cigars and drinking rum with the ladies, smoking Club of Havana to the intoxicating beat of a Cuban band. An embassy Christmas party also comes to mind the Las Vegas theme with round hanging lamps of colored light reflected in the water of the swimming pool, the bold and beautiful of Havana dancing at its edge, not to mention the flame juggler prancing on the roof above. But I also had many moments of frustration trying to navigate daily life in the Caribbean Communist state. It's a world of shortages. Like a hunter gatherer, I scoured the Soviet style stores stocked with an erratic selection of powdered and pickled things, and searched out farmers markets for the best and cleanest fruit and vegetables. One of my lowest lows was discovering the supermarket had run out of porridge oats. One of my high points was finding decent salad greens. I was just as mesmerized as everyone else by the antique American cars still rattling along the streets. But I also learned to negotiate the poorly lit, poorly marked potholed roads in the new Chinese model that's become even more ubiquitous. Like all visitors, I was seduced by the grace and rhythm of the young people dancing up a salsa storm at one of the many nightclubs. My companion less so. Everyone here is fishing, she said, meaning on the prowl for a foreign lover who could serve as a ticket out of the country. It's a world defined by waves of emigration, the latest involving young people despairing of cautious reforms introduced six years ago. Revamping five decades of a mismanaged state run economy was never going to be easy. But for Cubans, the US embargo looms largest as their source of hardship. When I asked what lifting it would mean, some talked dreamily about their own version of paradise. Every sphere of our lives would change, said a female university student. Everyone would have access to the Internet. Our communications with other countries would change. We could get whatever materials we needed. A magazine editor was more circumspect. Cubans always ask me what's going to happen when the embargo is lifted, he said. We're so used to it that how to live without it is a big question mark. It creates a certain amount of anxiety and a complexity of emotions. We're culturally closer to the US than any other country in this hemisphere, he told me. Jazz and baseball are a part of us. But then, he added, the challenge is whether we could have a normal relationship with the US and keep our independence. A young artist put the same idea differently. Our national character is to defy the bully, she said. But on the other hand, we want to be the best. The sharp tip of the arrow in Latin America. If the bully was out of the picture, we could finally focus on becoming that sharp arrow. Fidel Castro embodied that determination to chart a course outside the US orbit. I found the vestiges of his legendary defiance in a side hallway of the Revolution Museum, the wall of cretins, the with life size cartoons of Republican American presidents Ronald Reagan and the George Bush's father and son. Some believe the rapprochement announced this week couldn't have happened if Fidel was still in charge, although he did reach out to almost every US President, gauging chances of accommodation. When Castro goes, Cuba will become just another country, said an American journalist who's lived in Havana for much of his rule. There are fears that that will happen now already with the US policy changes. Get to Cuba while it still retains its old World Char Canadian Tour company is urging before the floodgates open for American tourists. I think this is a big part of the isn't Cuba fabulous? Question, the mystique of a country frozen in time, with a culture that is not Americanized and commercialized. That isn't going to shift right away. Although the embargo's been eased, it hasn't been lifted, and the Cuban government will want to control the pace of change. But it's not difficult to imagine the eventual invasion of the likes of Starbucks and McDonald's Cubans don't want to be frozen in time. They want modern day economic opportunities. They want to be connected to the world, but they also want to remain distinctly Cuban. What it will be like to live without the US bully is a big question mark.
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And that's Barbara Pletasher. The Iraqi army is trying to prevent one of the country's key provinces from falling into the hands of the militants from Islamic State. The jihadis already control much of Anbar to the west of the capital Baghdad. Despite support for the security forces forces from air strikes carried out by the US and its allies, there's been heavy fighting around the city of Ramadi. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes and an army base once occupied by US troops has also come under attack. Quentin Somerville's been there.
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The Iraqi commander sat at his desk, a large map of Anbar covering the wall behind. His hands were shaking and he chain smoked his way through a pack of cigarettes. Everything was going well at the front, he said. In the fight with the so called Islamic State. He looked exhausted and gulped for air. No, he wouldn't do an interview on camera or for radio. He stopped, gasped, swallowed hard. I thought for a moment he may actually be about to vomit. Clearly things were not going that well at the front. We'd flown to the Ain Al Assad air base with the Iraqi air force. The trip had taken most of a year to plan and in that time most of Anbar had fallen into the hands of the Islamic State and its supporters. The base is sprawling and ghostly. It once belonged to Saddam Hussein, then to the Americans. It was one of their biggest during the Iraq war. They left behind a mess. In one corner the ruins of American accommodation and near where the Iraqis now stored unexploded is roadside bombs. A hut full of brand new but abandoned US uniforms. I came here expecting an Iraqi offensive. Instead found a retreat. Village after village was being lost. The base was being encircled. It was days before I saw an armored vehicle. They were all out at the fight. Iraq's army collapsed in the face of is elsewhere in the country. In Anbar. They're holding on. But only just the booms of artillery and mortars could be heard in the distance. By my third day they sounded a lot closer. My bosses in London were getting jumpy. Get the next flight out, I was told. But there weren't any. In many villages in this Sunni dominated province the militants have been welcomed. A relief from the oppression of the Shia led government of the previous prime minister, Nouri Al Maliki. But there are those who are fighting back. One night, I met a man from the Al Bunimr tribe. I'll call him Mahmud, a friend of the Americans and an enemy of is. Much depends on the likes of him. He's said to be a fearsome fighter, but Mahmud's no Lawrence of Arabia style tribal warrior. He wore a tracksuit and sandals. He had a neatly trimmed beard, but his hair was gelled. Anbar's Sunni tribes, who once formed the Awakening, an uprising against Al Qaeda led by the Americans, will be essential to defeating is. He told me he'd been in the thick of the fighting. They had armoured vehicles, we only had Kalashnikovs, he said of the IS offensive. One fighter from Mahmud's tribe Is said to have killed 15 members of IS before he was run over by an armoured vehicle. He said that the tribe had fought hard and 35 of its men had been captured. He also told me stories of IS atrocities against the tribe of Ayah's. Drowning babies, raping women. They've beheaded hundreds of Al Bu nimer men, he said. Mahmoud had moved his family to safety and was trying to get a flight to Baghdad to find more men and more weapons for the fight raging outside the camp's perimeter. Do you think the base will fall? I asked him. Maybe, he said. But the Americans are here now. They won't let it. Some 150 US Marines are at Iron Al Assad training tribal fighters, but I saw no sign of them while I was there. The camp's airstrip once played host to Air Force One. George Bush came to visit in 2007 and declared another victory. Anbar was the safest place in Iraq, he said. Then the enemy was Al Qaeda in Iraq, a group that would morph, retreat and then expand again, but with a new name the Islamic State. On the edge of the Runway, we waited for a flight, any flight, to get out. The not so distant booms were more regular now. Iraqi army officers queued up, too. Shiite militia stood in a line, looking exhausted, and the wounded, bandaged and bleeding, crouched by a fence. Mahmoud and his cousin were there too. A plane arrived, a small Russian Antonov. The crowd surged forward. It was chaotic. I felt a tap on my shoulder. A handsome pilot in his jumpsuit. Are you the BBC? I've been told to get you out of here. As the loading ramp was closing, some of the wounded attempted to get on. They were pushed back. I've never felt more ashamed. Mahmud and his cousin were still on the Runway. Perhaps they're still there, waiting for Help.
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Quentyn Somerville in Anbar Province, Iraq. Four days to go until Christmas and celebrations at churches throughout the Christian world are already in full swing. And the Crimean Memorial Church in the Turkish city of Istanbul is no exception. The church was built to honour the thousands of British soldiers and sailors who perished in the Crimean War in the middle of the 19th century. This little known place of worship is hidden away in a web of cobbled streets on the slopes above the Bosphorus. Malcolm Billings, who searched out its greystone towers on a recent visit, says that given its history, it's a miracle that it survived at all.
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The bell tower, just visible above a dense curtain of trees, was my first glimpse of this barely remembered Victorian Gothic church. This distant fragment of British influence, built on land given by the Ottoman sultan, cost a fortune. The distinctive grey stone for the church was brought from Malta, and its carved Gothic interior once glistened with gold leaf and brass fittings. When the chaplain, Cannon Ian Sherwood, arrived to take up his Post Just over 20 years ago, the church was closed and almost derelict. The dwindling congregation of Levantines, expatriate Europeans and Americans had abandoned the leaking roofs and decaying rafters to a growing number of pigeons. The stained glass windows had become targets for stone throwing looters who carried off every everything of value they could find. The Bishop of Gibraltar, in charge of a diocese that stretched from Lisbon to Mongolia, could see no future for an abandoned church. He proposed leasing the building to the city for use as a cultural centre. The new canon protested and moved his bed into the chancel. It was the only dry place in the church, he tells me, and with the priest in residence, the bishop's plan to rid the diocese of this troublesome outpost could not be realized. The fortunes of the church began to change. The new chaplain opened the crypt as a sanctuary for asylum seekers, young men on the run from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Iran. Many were craftsmen in their own countries. Plumbers, carpenters and electricians who worked for their keep in the church by doing basic repairs. At first, the chaplain used his stipend to finance the project. But gradually, funds built up from a growing congregation. The altar and rood screen were recreated and rebuilt. Parishioners and friends were models for the saints figures newly painted on the screen. Willing children were immortalized as angels walking through the nave. Ian Sherwood points to where the huge organ, made in England, was found in pieces scattered all over the floor. A young African from the cathedral in Lagos reconstructed this. He tells me. These days the church sponsors concerts, lectures and events such as Turkish rug making. One of the Iranian asylum seekers offers English classes. The others include several young men from various Asian countries who escort me to the west door and down into the crypt. Beds have been fitted in between the columns that support the spacious vaulted ceiling. They look comfortable, too. The vestry has been turned into a bathroom and kitchen. They all have jobs to do around the church. Some grow beans and tomatoes in the garden and collect eggs from the ducks and chickens that roam around the compound. One is in charge of the well and the water supply to the church. They take it in turns to cook. These duties make them enough money to buy food and essentials to keep body and soul together. But sitting around a highly polished table in the wooden shelly like cottage that serves as a rec, it's clear that some feel they're living on charity and they don't like it. These are educated men. One's been to university and they all had good jobs before they fled. Another was a cashier in a school in Peshawar before his local church was attacked by two suicide bombers. There was huge loss of life and many of the survivors, he tells me, were threatened and told they had to renounce Christianity and convert to Islam. They talked to me about forged passports and the long journeys overland which finally brought them here to the crypt of the Crimean Memorial Church. A man from Sri Lanka tells me that the army there falsely accused him of being a Tamil spy and tortured him. His journey here to Istanbul, along with his wife and three children, took seven years, and in all that time, he said, on the verge of tears, he his children never went to school. Ian Sherwood has seen more than 2,000 asylum seekers come and go since he opened the hostel. Some, after a long wait, have ended up with New Zealand, Australian and Canadian visas. Others, fed up with waiting, have left to take their chances at one or other of the European Union's borders. This year has proved tougher than ever for the asylum seekers, with more than a million men, women and children displaced from their homes in Syria. I asked one of the Pakistanis in the crypt what he thought would happen to him now. After a long pause, he said quietly, I don't know.
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Malcolm Billings in Istanbul. Now, what better time of year to muse about whisky and about chocolate biscuits? Have you ever wondered how bourbon whisky got its name? Or bourbon biscuits, for that matter? And what's their connection with the French royal family? Who are the Royal Bourbons, and where do they come from? Well, the answer lies in an obscure part of central France. Le Bourbonnais, as it's known. That's where a dynasty of local seigneurs first emerged more than a thousand years ago, which went on to wear the crowns of France, Spain, Naples, Sicily, and to lend their name to those biscuits, Hugh Schofield has just been off in search of the origins of the Bourbon.
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In the beginning was the God, the Celtic God, Borvo. He was God of healing and of spring water. Shrines to Borvo could be found across France, wherever ancient Gauls took a taste to the water that came naturally from the ground. One such place is now the small town of Bourbon La Chambeau. This is the vast lost middle bit of France. The folds of the land are getting deeper, so the countryside is rounded and fecund. A lot of forests, a lot of pasture for the lazy white Charolais cows. Bourbon La Chambeau is Bourbon from Borvo, the God and Archambault. After nine of its first rulers or seigneurs, there was Archombeau I in about 950 and Archombeau IX 200 years later. the start of that period, it must have been a lot like the television series Game of Thrones. The French crown in Paris was distant to the point of irrelevance. Instead, across the country, petty lords imposed a new territorial order after the confusion of the preceding centuries. The first Archambeau built a castle and the remains of its 13th century successor. Three massive towers still dominate the land. So how did this particular group of early medieval thrusters, no doubt every bit as nasty as the thugs of House Lannister or House Baratheon, end up where rest fail to on the throne in the French equivalent of King's Landing that is Paris? Well, the story is just as long and full of war and treachery as George R.R. martin himself could have made it. First, the Archambeau took the name Dukes of Bourbon after marrying into the royal family. Then, in the 1500s, Duke Charles III, who as leader of the royal army, bears the title Constable of France, does the unmentionable and defects to king's arch enemy, the Holy Roman Emperor. The Bourbon estates are seized by the crown. The Bourbon name is mud. But now the brutal wars of religion between Catholic and Protestant are raging in France. The head of the Bourbon house has married the heiress to Navarre, a mountain kingdom way to the south. Their son Henry is brought up a Protestant and he fights the kings in Paris. But after they all die, the last murdered by a monk. And Henry is the legitimate heir. So in order to win over his enemies, he converts to Catholicism. Paris, he says, is worth a mass and becomes Henry iv, France's first Bourbon king. Over the next three centuries, the Bourbons influence spreads further. After the War of the Spanish Succession in the early 1700s, bourbons, or bourbons as the English were now calling them, took the crown of Spain and they still got it. Other branches ruled as kings in Naples and Sicily and as dukes in Parma and Luxembourg. In France, all those bewigged Louis in Versailles were Bourbons. One lost his head in the revolution, but they came back after Napoleon. And today the pretenders to the French throne, the two of them are both from the Bourbon family. There's even supposed to be a branch of the Bourbons in India, descended from some royal nephew or other in the 18th century. They live in Bhopal, look thoroughly Indian and are the subject of sporadic magazine features today. Back in the Bourbonnet these affairs are a distant memory. The main town, Moulin, was the capital of the later Jukes, but it's a drab place now, like so many provincial French towns, its supposed medieval charm a fiction of the tourist brochures. Bourbon La Chambeau is lovely though, as is the thousand year old priory of Souvigny, where many of the dukes are buried. There I also chanced on the tomb of one Prince Sixtus of Bourbon Parma, brother in law of the last emperor of Austro Hungary and the man behind an obscure peace initiative in the First World War known as the Sixtus Affair. And so finally to the whisky. What's the connection there? How did Bourbon become Bourbon? Well, the home of Bourbon whiskey is said to be Bourbon county in Kentucky and it was so named after the war of American Independence as a gesture of thanks to the French king, the Bourbon Louis xvi, for his help against the Brits. Or it comes from Bourbon street, familiar to the carousers of New Orleans, a town which was of course founded by the French and named after the Bourbon Duke of Orleans, son of Louis xiv. You take your pick. As for the biscuits, that's even easier. In fact, the chocolate crunchy sandwich used to be called the Criola. But Sometime in the 1930s, a product manager at biscuit company Peak Freens, drawing no doubt on some vaguely remembered cultural reference, decided that the name Bourbon sounded, oh, I don't know, just that little bit posher, a little bit French and a little bit royal too.
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So now you know. And just in time for the Christmas pub quiz too. Hugh Schofield bringing this edition to a close. More correspondence stories next Saturday. Do join us. Goodbye.