← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
The Libyan Truffle
00:27:43
Correspondents' stories: why President Assad may now believe he's winning the the man...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent. You can hear the version of the programme we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our site at BBConline. But here's the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
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Good morning. Today, why President Assad may believe he's winning the argument in Syria. The Jordanians hoping the Syrian revolution will spill over into their country. Officially, they're banned. So why are chains and shackles still being used on the mentally ill? In Indonesia, we're given a suspicious looking envelope by a Libyan army officer. And under luminous skies in Norway, tuck into some steaming reindeer stew. Seven million Syrians now need humanitarian assistance. That's the latest estimate from the United nations, which says the Assad regime in Damascus is hindering the distribution of aid. The UN Security Council has also been hearing that more than 4 million people there have been displaced and another million have sought shelter in neighbouring countries. The organization's High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, said the figures were terrifying and risked becoming unsustainable. Jeremy Bowen in the Syrian capital has been talking to people trying to get on with their lives in the midst of this civil war.
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In the news business, the word tragic can be overused. That does not apply in Syria. In this place, it feels more like an understatement. A doctor in one of the military hospitals in Damascus struggled to find the right words. Everyone does. In the end, he just said, I don't recognize this place anymore. This is not our life, he said. This is not our country. He talked as if he'd blundered into someone else's nightmare. I used to tell my friends in Britain, he said to come to Syria because it was safe and wonderful. He was right. Three years ago, I brought my mother and my daughter, then 9 years old, to Syria for a holiday. We walked through the old city of Damascus and drove up the highway to Aleppo, past Homs and Hammer, and stopped off near Idlib at the deserted towns known as the Dead Cities. They are hundreds of settlements that sprawl across a high moorland that were abandoned more than a thousand years ago. Syria was, as the doctor said, a friendly and safe place to visit. It isn't anymore. The other morning, the head of the UN World Food Program in Syria, which feeds two and a half million people every month, told me about a trip he's just done from Damascus to Aleppo. He said they went through 50 checkpoints on the road between Syria's two biggest cities. Just over half were government troops. Armed rebels manned the rest of the President Assad was on TV this week. He denied there were any such things as liberated areas controlled by rebels in Syria. But the fact is that the only contact the President's men have with large parts of the country is through the sights of a weapons system that even applies to districts of Damascus. The regime controls the core of the city, but much of the sprawling, impoverished ring of suburbs around it is in the hands of the rebels. That's why all day and sometimes all night, there's the crump of artillery fire from the Syrian army's positions directed into the concrete jungles on the edge of town. The bangs are not constant, but they're regular and steady and sometimes intense. Right now I can see a tall black column of smoke coming from a fire that the attacks have started in one of the rebel held suburbs. I went down to the eastern end of government controlled Damascus, just beyond Abyssin Square, which used to be one of its posher neighborhoods. Sandbag military positions start in one of the roads off the square, which leads to a suburb called Jobar. Every so often, an armoured personnel carrier or a tank screeches around the Abyssin Square roundabout. In the streets that lead into the square, life goes on. Shops are open, though the prices of basics like tomatoes have doubled. I spoke to a woman who lives in direct line of sight of the rebels in Jobar. She was standing outside her local shopping mall and restaurant, which was battered and shuttered and barely functioning. It had a newly built blast wall where plate glass used to be. They've given up replacing the windows. Human beings are resilient. The woman, she didn't want me to use her name, said that she was planning a barbecue at the local cafe with her neighbors. But she was scared she'd be caught in the open by a stray bullet or one of the mortars that the now much more heavily armed rebels can lob out of their territory. I have no idea what's in the mind of President Assad, but I get the impression from people close to the regime that despite everything, they believe they're winning not just the war, but the argument that's because their Russian and Iranian allies are holding firm and because after two years, the Assads are still here. The former leaders of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya lasted respectively days, weeks and months after insurrections began. The Assad seem satisfied that their claim they're facing jihadist fighters has finally come true. Secular Syrians and others say the regime's own violence has created the conditions for jihadists to flourish. Mark Twain wrote that in Damascus, years were only moments. Time, he said, was measured by the empires. The city has seen rise and fall, but people count their lives in months and years. Families, friends and jobs. Damascus and Syria will get through this. It's tragic that so many of its people will not.
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And that's Jeremy Bowen. Increasingly, the focus of the battle for Syria has been in the south of the country. In recent weeks, rebel forces have captured a string of posts along the border with Jordan, and refugees in their hundreds of thousands have continued to pour into the country. In public, at least, Jordan has steered a more nuanced course than some other countries in the region, calling for a negotiated solution to the conflict. But as the war has dragged on, the Jordanians have been preparing for the eventual fall of the regime in Damascus. Both Oman and Washington are particularly concerned by the rise of the fundamentalist rebel group called the Al Nusra Front. However, Gabriel Gatehouse says that in Jordan, it's the Islamists who seem to have confidence and momentum on their side.
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I'd been reluctant to meet Abu Mohammed. Well, no, that's not quite true. He'd been reluctant to meet me. I'd in fact asked to meet him, but I was, I admit, a bit scared. In his day job, Abu Mohammed is a car battery salesman. His real job, though, is to recruit young Jordanian Salafists to cross into Syria and fight for the Al Nusra front. For the moment, the Islamists of Al Nusra share a common enemy with the more secular minded Free Syrian army, the fsa. But they're separated by a vast ideological gulf. A few days earlier, Al Nusra had declared its allegiance to Al Qaeda. Abu Mohammed was under strict instructions not to talk to journalists. But on the phone, my guide and translator had played a cunning trick. He'd appealed to the one weak spot that nearly all Arabs share, Sunni or Shia, liberal and fundamentalist alike. Hospitality. Won't you even welcome us for a cup of coffee? He'd said in exaggerated tones of incredulous hurt. And so we found ourselves in an industrial part of a medium sized town on a strip lined with garages and mechanics workshops. A man with a thermos flask and a surprisingly welcoming smile beckoned us to join him. I should mention here that Abu Mohammed is not his real name. He asked me not to reveal any detail that could possibly give his identity away. Not because he was worried about the Muhabarat, the Jordanian internal security service. No, they knew who and where he was. He'd been arrested in the past and he fully expected to be detained again. But he said it wasn't in the group's interests to give an on the record interview at this point. So let's just say that he wore his beard long and his hair short, topped with a skullcap. The Jihadists uniform There are at the moment around 500 Jordanian Salafists fighting in Syria, he said as he poured me a cup of strong black coffee. 35 had been martyred, killed, he added. Not that many, I thought, given the length and brutality of the conflict. How do you go about recruiting your fighters? I asked him. I tell them jihad is a religious duty, he replied simply. Here's what else, he said. After we defeat Bashar al Assad, then we'll take on Hassan Nasrallah. Hassan Nasrallah is the leader of Hezbollah, the Iranian backed Lebanese Shia movement. For Abu Mohammed and many Sunni fundamentalists like him, the war against the secularist Syrian regime is is merely a foretaste of a much bigger battle yet to come. It's a battle that began with a schism in Islam in the seventh century and appears to be coming to a head in our present age. Did he consider himself to be allied to Al Qaeda? I inquired. He dismissed the question. There are many movements with many names, he said. Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, the Salafists. We all share the same aim. Their goal is the creation of an Islamic caliphate, a global order in which their strict interpretation of God's law prevails to the exclusion of all others. This is as much a threat to the Jordanian establishment as it is to the regime of Bashar al Assad. Indeed, it's worrying governments from Riyadh to Washington, from Jerusalem to London. People like Abu Mohammed are the reason that Western governments are desperately trying to find ways of providing assistance to the Free Syrian army people they hope they'll be able to do business with if and when the current regime in Damascus goes. Abu Mohammed said that he too had heard the reports that FSA fighters were traveling to Jordan to receive training from former American soldiers. If this is true, he told me, it's because they're scared of us. Officially, the FSA denies its getting any training on Jordanian soil. The Jordanian government denies it too. Very little happens on Syria's southern frontier without the knowledge of the Jordanian Muhabarat. Certainly nothing crosses it without at least their tacit approval. And so the FSA are reliant on the goodwill of the Jordanian state to bring fighters and weapons across the border. But why would the Muhabharat allow the Salafists to cross over as well Abu Muhammad laughed. Sometimes the Jordanians turn a blind eye to us, he said. They want us to get killed fighting in Syria. They want us out of the country. But they're also worried the revolution may come back across the border and added, inshallah, God willing, it will.
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And that was Gabriel Gatehouse. Indonesia may be among the so called G20 nations. It's also one of the world's fastest growing economies. But some of its methods of treating the mentally ill seem positively medieval. Officially, the practice of chaining up or shackling patients was outlawed there many years ago. Yet it still goes on, particularly in rural parts of the country. Now the government's announced new legislation which decrees shackling will stop in 2014. But as Karishma Vaswani has been finding out, at the moment, it's still going on, even in institutions funded by the government.
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The first thing that hits you when you arrive at the Galu foundation is the smell. It's an overwhelming, overpowering stench. A combination of rotten human urine and feces. The mixed in with the horse manure from the shed outside the complex. The smell is so strong it makes you retch. For days after the visit, it followed me everywhere. I couldn't shake it off. I haven't been able to forget what I saw at the Galu Foundation. This is a home for Indonesia's mentally ill, partly funded by the Indonesian government. It gets the equivalent of 6,500 pounds a year from the Social Welfare Ministry for food and other requirements. Galu doesn't believe in modern medicine, so it uses iron chains to restrain its patients and treats them with herbs and potions. And it is. I found a disturbing, depressing place. In the middle of the compound, there's a giant iron cage locked from the outside. Inside, There were about 40 people, mostly men, many naked, sitting quietly, some of them in chains. In another corner of the complex, outside the cage, around a dozen other men and women were lying on wooden platforms. Many were chained to these makeshift beds. I tried to talk to one of them, a skinny man in his mid-20s. I asked his name and what he thought of his treatment, but I got no response. He just sat and stared, apparently looking at nothing. The people who work here say most of the patients at Galu were brought by their families at any given time. I was told about 10 per cent of the 280 residents were shackled. We use these chains just to be careful, Jhajat Sudrajat, one of the staff members said as he showed me around. We stepped in front of another young man shackled to his bed, bare chested, sitting quietly and calmly on the floor. Underneath him, a swarm of flies buzzed around a pile of fresh human feces. Take this man EE, Mr. Sidrajat continued. He suffers from hallucinations and those kinds of things. That's why we've had him shackled these past two weeks. The practice of shackling, or Pasung, as it's known here in Indonesia, was officially outlawed in 1979, but the ban had little or no effect. A new campaign was started in 2011, committing the government to ending the practice by 2014. Mr. Sudraja was anyway keen to stress that there was a difference between shackling and what goes on at Galu. Here we don't practice pasung, he insisted. He went on to explain that here patients were let out of their chains from time to time, depending on their mood. Once they stop being dangerous to themselves and others, we take the shackles off, he said. Sometimes we let them out to go to the toilet, he added. Galu was started in 1994 by a man named Gendu Mulathep, who believed that a combination of prayers, herbal treatments and chaining people temporarily could cure them. His son, Suhanda now runs the place and boasts of its success rate, although he wasn't specific about how many people he's cured. So why does the Indonesian government continue to fund a place where shackling, despite being banned, still goes on? Diya Uttami, the Indonesian director of mental health, told me that she deeply regretted the sort of conditions I'd seen at Galu. She confirmed that her administration had been hoping to end the practice next year, but admitted that it was likely to miss this target. When I talk to these foundations, she said, they think shackling is the best method for their patients, and families still send their mentally ill relatives there. So it's a very difficult problem to fix. For many Indonesians, seeing a family member afflicted with a mental disease is frightening and confusing. There is far less information about mental illnesses in Indonesia than in other countries. Many uneducated Indonesians who live in rural areas believe that these ailments are the result of curses or black magic. To add to the problem, doctors say there just aren't enough hospitals or doctors to treat patients either. There are only 800 trained psychiatrists in the country and 34 dedicated facilities for the mentally ill. The Ministry of Health in Jakarta says it believes that up to 5% of Indonesia's 240 million strong population is struggling with a mental illness. And although the government is on record as saying that stamping out shackling is a priority. It's clear the practice is unlikely to end anytime soon. Little comfort, I reflected, for the unfortunate souls I saw sitting in chains, gazing
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at nothing at Galu Kirishma Vaswani. There, these are exciting days in the northernmost reaches of Scandinavia. As the days lengthen with the onset of spring, they're about to witness the annual migration of huge herds of reindeer. After spending the winter inland in one of Europe's last great wildernesses, and the animals are moved to pastures along the coast for the summer, the reindeer play a central role in the livelihoods and culture of the Lapps, the Sami people. But this way of life is under pressure, as David Shukman has been learning on an expedition in northern Norway.
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Through the dark of an Arctic night, a tiny glimmer of light shone from the window of a hut. This was our sanctuary. We'd been on the move for 12 hours, riding by dog sled. And shelter from the cold couldn't come soon enough. It was well below freezing and the snow was so deep that we sank into it. Past our knees, our torches picked out the wooden walls of the hut and a few stunted trees. Otherwise, we were in a landscape so empty it was hard to remember that this was part of overcrowded Europe. My mobile phone hadn't had a signal all day. Look at a map of northern Norway and you'll see very few roads and only a handful of towns. Our expedition of nine people, each towed by a team of huskies, hardly encountered another soul. After passing through valleys and over hills, our journey took us across frozen lakes and uplands of unblemished white. When it was cloudy, or when there were flurries of snow, the landscape appeared almost lunar and barren. But when the sun came out, a golden light would transform the scene, revealing the details of cliffs, streams, clumps of woodland and herds of reindeer. Brown and sturdy, their antlers silhouetted against the white. The reindeer clear away snow to reach the food they rely on in winter, lichen. Amazingly, life is possible here. And when we reached our hut, we saw exactly what the reindeer mean to the people of this region, the Sami. Our host, Ellen Anna Ciri, is one of the few women to own a herd of reindeer. She welcomed us with an enormous dish of stew of reindeer meat, of course, exactly what we needed for breakfast the next day. She offered a plate of dried reindeer, hard, also delicious. And she couldn't resist dressing my daughter, Kitty, in clothes made of reindeer skin. The connection between the Sami people and these great animals has been about survival in a Hostile land, and it runs very deep. There's a legacy lasting millennia of living together in the polar north. The most immediate threat is from predators like the wolf and the bear. So we were told, if you need to go to the toilet at night, which involved walking quite a distance through the snow, make sure you're accompanied so someone can keep a lookout. Suddenly the wilderness seemed very wild indeed. But for the Sami, this is nothing compared to the fundamental challenges they faced. Historically, as semi nomads, they'd been rather irritating to the various governments here. For years, Norway tried to make the Sami people more Norwegian. And along with Finland, Sweden and Russia, Norway closed its borders at various times, blocking the annual migrations. In the Second World War, when the Nazis were driven back by the Soviet army, the Sami suffered terribly. The nuclear accident at Chernobyl released a radioactive cloud which contaminated thousands of their reindeer. More recently, with rising temperatures in the Arctic, the Sami say the shorter winters are forcing them to change the patterns of their herding. And on top of all that, the grazing lands are under constant pressure from developers and prospectors. Inevitably, there's been a drift to the cities to an easier life. Traditional cultures experience that the world over. But the Sami are resisting. After our journey, we watched a kind of Sami Olympics with people and reindeer from across the region. The highlight was the reindeer racing, the animals tugging youngsters on skis at incredible speed. Later, there was a full house for a competition for Joiking. Joiks are songs of praise, highly personal and often rather haunting. I found one sung to a daughter particularly moving. But then a band struck up. Joiks have had an electronic makeover that's given them the sound of something from the Eurovision Song Contest. My first thought was that Sammy culture could easily drown in a sea of light. Pop. But then I wondered if this was actually a clever way of keeping alive an age old practice. I stepped outside into the bitter cold. Above me, a vast green stripe arced across the sky. It was the mesmerizing sight of the northern lights, strangely shaped clouds glowing and twisting from horizon to horizon. It occurred to me that the Sami people are among the very few to live under this spectacular show. And their ancestors must have enjoyed it too. Somehow, the Sami have adapted the and coped and survived over thousands of years, each generation gazing up at the swirling, luminous skies while warming their hands on a bowl of reindeer stew.
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David Shookman now as a correspondent, things often don't turn out quite as you expected. You go to cover one story and come back telling another. Rana Giwad went to visit an army camp near Tripoli to see how the Libyans were getting on rebuilding their military in the post Colonel Gaddafi era. She was hoping to hear the latest on their plans for dealing with the bands of heavily armed militants roaming the country, but returned home with little in the way of military insight. She was, however, clutching a bulky and rather suspicious looking envelope.
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A large whiteboard charting the chain of command hung on the office wall. Major Khalid's name was at the top of it. I'm in for a hard hitting interview with a real tough guy, I thought to myself. He leads a special Forces unit trained by the Americans. Instead, I was met by a softly spoken, tall, slight man with graying hair and a light handshake. Before stepping outside for a tour of the Special Forces training camp, Major Khaled said he had something to show me. Was it a new American state of the art light weapon? I wondered. He held out his palm like a magician to uncover a deformed white ball covered in red dirt. It didn't register at first. Then I peered closer and my eyes may have lit up. Is that a Libyan truffle? I asked. He grinned widely, nodding, remarking how much foreigners liked them and how many Libyans didn't. This was a desert truffle, a cousin of those in highbrow European restaurants where you might need to sell a kidney before you can afford to eat there. It's found in arid land and is meant to be milder in flavor. Some years ago I heard that Kuwaiti diplomats were buying them in bulk as presents for officials back home because, relatively, they're cheap in Libya. We set out for a look round the camp. Major Khalid apologetically explained that the American training officers had declined to be interviewed or, as I would soon find out, even be seen at all. I don't know why, he said. If anything, it's good advertising for them. No, there were some fresh trainees, a rather unimpressive group of scrawny young men, some still wearing their own suede loafers or white trainers, lining up for a drill. Many aren't keen on their uniforms. Apparently the color green is still associated with the Gaddafi era. Nearby, a more experienced unit was training just behind a stunning stretch of sand with rocky hilltops overlooking a shimmering Mediterranean coastline. Major Khalid explained the training routine I was about to witness was a staged demonstration and they wouldn't be using live ammunition for safety reasons. The 20 somethings piled onto three pickup trucks. The front vehicle held the bad guys whom the other two would pursue into a wide crater below us. It was like watching a silent movie about a kidnapping. Some of the masked men duly arrested the bad guys and drove back up. Major Khalid told me he hoped he was helping build a small, modern army that served the nation. The days of serving one man are over, he explained. Back in the office, he looked in vain for a plastic bag to shove the truffles in, but had to settle for a large white envelope instead. You must take these. You didn't even have lunch with us, or tea or coffee, he said. He told me they had been gathered by his family. The major is from Libya's western city of Zintan, in the mountains whose foothills are apparently a prime location for truffles. He served in the Libyan army for 18 years, but I'm not sure how much of that time he's been aspiring to be a chef. Don't peel, just scrub them and boil for about 20 minutes. Slice and salt them and then eat, he solemnly instructed. I was intrigued by his confidence in the culinary crime he had just confessed to. I had only ever seen truffles on cooking shows, beef being used very sparingly, kept raw and delicately shaved over pasta. The young soldiers manning the gates of the camp as we left reminded us how hazy the future of Libya's army still is. They appeared bored and slightly spaced out. That night I experimented with a single truffle as instructed. I watched skeptically as it simmered. I peeled off the dirty outer layer. The finished product was okay, though slightly dull. It just tasted like a more savory version of tofu with an earthy, nutty flavor. The next day at the office, I described the results of my experiment. Our producer looked on, unimpressed. I had given him a truffle to cook for himself because he had never tried one before. I sliced it, put it on a skewer, and roasted it over a small fire of twigs with a little olive oil and salt, he said. And I demanded. A dreamy smile crept onto his face. It was like eating liver, he cooed with delight. His mom had told him how to cook it. His dish sounded better than mine. The major's truffle recipe, I concluded, is perhaps as under seasoned as the men in the battalion he was trying to build.
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And that's it. Rana Jawad's Culinary Tips from the Libyan Military, bringing this edition to a close. I'll be here again next Saturday with more correspondence around the world and, who knows, maybe more dodgy recipes, too. Goodbye,