← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
The Lucky Country
00:27:48
Global despatches. In this edition, Australia's tough immigration policy comes under a...
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- [00:00]
A
This is a download from the BBC. It's from our own correspondent. We make one version of the program for the BBC World Service, but this is the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ad.
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Hello. Today, the Kurds put their dream of independence on hold. Australia, the country of migrants, is taken to court over its immigration policy. We find out why one of our correspondents has decided she'll no longer wear the headscarf or hijab. And who now cares that he once ordered 50 martini cocktails at the Ritz? Paris, it seems, has fallen out of love with Ernest Hemingway. Hundreds of thousands of families have now fled from other parts of Iraq into the autonomous region of Kurdistan in the north of the country. They're escaping from the militants of the self proclaimed Islamic State, who've taken swathes of territory in Iraq and in neighbouring Syria as well. Kurdistan is a place which has enjoyed mounting prosperity in recent years. It's been considered the safest and most secure part of Iraq. It seemed even to be heading for outright independence. But our correspondent Jim Muir, who is in the Kurdistan capital Erbil, says the current crisis is having a significant effect on the Iraqi Kurds and on their dreams for the future.
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The Peshmerga fighters thought it was terribly funny when a very loud bang went off and I and my team practically jumped out of our skins and started looking round in panic for something to dive under. It was, in fact some outgoing artillery fire from Kurdish positions nearby. It happened again several times during our visit, causing us to flinch, instinctively provoking further hilarity amongst the Kurds. We were in the town of Bakarta on the dusty plains southeast of Mosul. The Kurdish Peshmerga forces had just recaptured it from the militants of the Islamic State, whose black flags were still flying over a number of villages, shimmering in the haze. Further south, Bakharta itself was deserted of inhabitants. They'd sensibly fled and might not come back, for this is an Arab town now taken over by the Kurds, who say they need it strategically. They'd flooded the place with fighters spreading out through the narrow mud brick lanes. This was the Peshmerga as I've seen them many times before. Buoyant, good humoured, flushed with victory. They'd retaken Bakarta in just two or three hours and apparently without backing from American airstrikes, which helped them a few days earlier retake the vital strategic dam above Mosul after a much tougher battle. But barely two weeks earlier, it was a very different picture. The Peshmerga the name in Kurdish, means those who brave death, had a reputation for invincibility and ferocity, honed by years of struggle against Saddam Hussein's army. Now, suddenly, they collapsed in the face of a surprise lightning attack by an enemy, the Islamic State militants, who are certainly more ferocious, if not invincible. The IS fighters broke through Kurdish lines and were advancing on Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan Bulgaria. With not much standing in their way, they also overran the town of Sinjar, near the Syrian border in the far west, sending thousands of families from the minority Yazidi sect scrambling for safety. Many didn't make it, but the Americans intervened crucially with airstrikes to keep the militants back on the ground at Sinjar. It was Syrian Kurdish forces, the ypg, which intervened to clear a corridor and protect the Yazidis as they fled. Many questions are now being asked about why the much vaunted Peshmerga collapsed, especially the KDP of the Kurdistan President, Masoud Barzani, which predominates in this part of the country. Was it the result of 20 years of easy living and growing prosperity? Were the Kurds simply outgunned by the radicals, as they claimed? Or was it both of those elements and also complacency, a belief that the Islamic State would wouldn't pick a fight with the Kurds and might even make tolerable neighbors? Masoud Barzani seemed to imply that. When I saw him in June, after the Islamists had stormed Iraq's nearby second city, Mosul, he told me, you can pick your friends, but you don't pick your neighbors. He also startled me and the world by saying he was going to push for outright independence for Kurdistan within a matter of months. President Barzani knows that his neighbors, Iraq itself, Iran, Syria and Turkey have never been keen on Kurdish independence. The Americans are also not enthusiastic. Their NATO ally, Turkey itself, has a big and restless Kurdish population. But he may have been betting that they were all much too preoccupied with the region's convulsions to bother about a move by the Iraqi Kurds to seize the moment and declare independence. But such thoughts must now surely be shelved, at least for the moment. Kurdistan itself has been pulled deep into crisis and needs all the help it can get from powers that don't favor Kurdish independence. Iran was the first to respond to the Kurds appeals for better, more modern arms. America, the French and others are joining in. And US Air power is ultimately vital to Kurdish survival. After a period of betting increasingly on Turkey, Iraqi Kurdistan has been pushed back into the arms of Baghdad. It needs Iraq to function if there's to be any hope of defeating the Islamic State and returning to their homes the hundreds of thousands of desperate displaced Iraqi Arabs, Christians, Yazidis and others who flooded into Kurdistan. Like many Scots, most Kurds in their hearts long for independence. But looking at the very real crisis they face right now, many would reluctantly agree that the dream would will have to wait.
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Jim Muir there in Iraqi Kurdistan, a six year old girl is taking the Australian government to court. She's among a group of asylum seekers who say they were injured while being held at a detention centre on Christmas island in the Pacific Ocean. Their lawyers will argue that the government in Canberra has failed to provide them with adequate medical care. John Donnison tells us the case will spotlight the hard line immigration policy of Prime Minister Tony Abbott's government. It's seen thousands of would be migrants detained in a number of facilities away from the Australian mainland.
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A few weeks ago I was sitting by the shore in Gaza on a summer evening, looking out west over sun kissed waves, the chaos and carnage of the war at my back momentarily fading away. This week I sat by the shore in Sydney on a bright winter's day looking east, the waft of grilled lobster and calamari from the expensive harbourside restaurants drifting over my shoulder. Two wonderful ocean views, a world apart. If you like the sea, Sydney is the place to be. Its endless beaches, meandering coastal walks through lush bush and along rocky crags are one of the reasons the city is often voted among the world's most desirable places to live. Why wouldn't you want to come here to the lucky country? And indeed, Australia is a place of migrants until the age of aviation. And aside from the indigenous Aborigine population, everyone here came over the waves by boat. Irish, Scottish, English, Welsh, Italians, Greek and Lebanese, all seafaring folk. But now. Stop the boats is the political slogan that resonates from these shores to the world beyond. Australia's Conservative government was elected a year ago on a promise to bring an end to the flow of asylum seekers and refugees trying to reach this country by sea. And the politicians have honoured their pledge. A series of tough anti asylum seeker policies means the number of people arriving has fallen to almost nothing. The government argues that it has stopped hundreds from drowning at sea at the hands of people smugglers. It says it wants asylum seekers to try to come here through what it calls the proper channels. But all this has come at a cost. This country of migrants has now been branded by some as racist, callous and inhumane. A national shame in the eyes of many. There are now thousands of asylum seekers being held in grim offshore detention centres such as Manus island in Papua New guinea, with no prospect of ever being settled in Australia. Recently, a group of Christian leaders here accused the government of state sponsored child abuse over its detention of thousands of asylum seeking children. Documents have emerged showing Australian officials are working with the Syrian embassy of President Bashar Al Assad to repatriate people back home as their country descends into further mayhem. For many of the Syrians in Australian detention centres, the last thing they want is to be sent back or for their names to be handed over to the Syrian authorities. Of course, the issue of immigration and asylum seekers is not unique to Australia. Britain, France, Italy, Israel, America and Germany are all experiencing similar challenges. But in Australia the numbers are relatively small. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees Global Trends Report says at the end of last year there were around 48,000 refugees or asylum seekers with pending cases in Australia. In Britain the number was 150,000. France 280,000, Germany 330,000. And all these developed countries pale in comparison to the world's most accommodating countries when it comes to housing and refugees and asylum seekers. Pakistan 1.6 million. Lebanon 800,000. Jordan 600,000. One of the things I love most about Sydney is how cosmopolitan it feels. I buy my newspaper in the morning from an Egyptian. I can order bagels for breakfast in Bondi in Hebrew. I eat dim sum dumplings for lunch in Chinatown and wood fired pizza served by Neapolitans in the evening. And this is a country that until a few decades ago still had a racist white Australia immigration policy. Yes, that really was what it was called, favouring European pale skinned migrants. Things have thankfully changed since then. But although the stop the boat policy has attracted international criticism, polls show domestically the majority of Australians back it. A country of migrants doesn't want any more to come here. At least no more of those who arrive illegally by boat. But on the shores of Syria, Sri Lanka, Somalia and Gaza, there will be those looking out to the horizon who would give anything to escape their lives. Not long ago I was sitting by the beach in Gaza, drinking sweet sage tea, watching the waves among generous people who had lost almost everything. The other day in Sydney by the sea, I was invited to a corporate event at the famous opera house to taste a bottle of whisky apparently worth a quarter of a million dollars. The lucky country.
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And that's John Donison. Over the last few days, Parisians have been marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the city from the Germans in 1944. One man who played a marginal but much mythologized part in that story was the American writer Ernest Hemingway. As a student, I read and loved a moveable feast, full of Hemingway's joy of being young and alive. Hemingway tourism used to be big business in the city, but as our man in the French capital, Hugh Scofield has been finding out, rather to his regret, memories of the great man are starting to fade.
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Twenty years ago, when I first started reporting from Paris, a story on Hemingway would have been so corny you'd have got short shrift from any editor had you ever had the gall to suggest it. Paris was full of Hemingway wannabes, young people just out of university sitting dreamily in cafes and struggling to get their prose more muscular. There were guided tours around the sites, his homes on the Left bank, the Shakespeare and company bookshop. And no self respecting acolyte would be seen on the street without a copy of Hemingway's magisterial memoir of Paris in the 1920s, published posthumously under the title A Movable Feast. This week's commemoration of the Paris liberation brought it all back because August 1944 was in fact one of the most celebrated episodes in the Hemingway legend. Already famous for his books, he was working as a correspondent attached to the American 5th Infantry Division, which was south west of Paris at the town of Rambouillet. Here, in flagrant breach of the Geneva Conventions governing war reporting, Hemingway set up as a kind of mini war lord. His hotel room was full of grenades and uniforms and he had command of a band of Free French fighters who reconnoitered the approach to Paris and provided information to the allied armies. On August 25, the day of the German surrender, he entered Paris with the Americans from the West. With British battle smoke marking the skyline, he careered down the Champs Elysees to the Travellers Club, still there today next to Abercrombie and Finch, and ordered a bottle of champagne. He and his band of brothers then drove through celebrating crowds to the Ritz Hotel, also still there, of course, it's where Princess Diana spent her last hours. The hotel was empty apart from the manager, a man called Ansello, who politely acceded to their request, and for 50 martini cocktails. The Ritz plays a big part in the Hemingway story, because in the mid-1950s, when he was staying there on another visit, staff remembered that there were two mouldering trunks in the basement which he'd left for safekeeping back in 1928. Inside were manuscripts and mementos from his first years in Paris, when, after his brief and heroic stint as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in the First World War, he'd come back to Europe in search of literary adventure. This is the period that came to epitomise the romantic ideal of the young writer, basking in the freedom of his youth and his hopes and the newness of his surroundings. With a stout pair of legs, you can seek out the Hemingway hangouts. Probably the most evocative is the third floor flat at 74 Rue Castle Cardinal Le Moine, just behind the Ponthon, which is where he first lived with his young wife, Hadley. In his memoir, he remembers the hole in the floor, toilets on each landing with concrete footmarks to prevent you slipping in, and the goatherd who came by with his flock selling milk, and the noise from the dancing in the cafes below. Today it's still a noisy, boozy quarter. From here, you can follow the path he takes in one of his chapters, down past the pantheon to Boulevard St. Michel and then the cafe at the Place St. Michel, which is where he comes to write when it's cold. I was writing about up in Michigan, he says, and since it was a wild, cold, blowing sort of day, it was that sort of day in the story. He sees a pretty girl, and he wishes he could put her in his story. I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now. Whoever you are waiting for, you belong to me, and all Paris belongs to me. And I belong to this notebook and this pencil. This is the kind of stuff that used to set young writerly hearts racing, I guess. I hope it still does, though I do have the distinct feeling that, as with everything in this life, Hemingway mania is now beginning to slip into the past. The walking tours don't draw the crowds. Visiting students have younger heroes now. Something, though, from that period, Paris in the twenties. It won't ever go away. It was a movable feast, a glorious time that afterwards stayed with Hemingway wherever he went. And even today, when you see, as you sometimes do, a young, solitary dreamer staring through a rainstreaked Paris cafe window, pencil in mouth, or more likely, fingers on open laptop, you're catching a distant echo of that once lived heaven.
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Hugh Scofield walking in Hemingway's footsteps. Now, if you're off to Greece for a late summer holiday and hoping for empty beaches, well, you should have gone last year. This year the tourists are back in force, no longer deterred by the demonstrations and tear gas which marked the worst days of that country's financial crisis. The economists are still far from upbeat. There is talk of modest growth on the way, but that won't do much to reduce those Greek mountains of debt. Mark Loewen's been our correspondent in Athens since 2011. He's been packing up, preparing for a new BBC posting elsewhere.
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All that's left is a small plastic stool in my empty living room. I'm perched awkwardly on it, trying to find a comfortable writing position. Forgive me if I sound pained. And with Athens closing down for the August holiday, the screeching motorbikes are absent. All I hear is the echo as I tap away and the cicadas singing outside in the orange trees. It took just four hours for the army of removal men to pack up my life in Greece for the last three years. As I enjoyed a farewell dinner with friends mulling over the transience of it all, one raised a glass of masticha, Greek aniseed liqueur. There's one thing I will happily toast, he said. Maybe the BBC leaving means Greece has calmed down, that we're finally boring again. Never dull, but far quieter. The chaos of the financial crisis when I arrived was exhausting the country and those of us covering it. The air hung heavy with tear gas. The thud of petrol bombs fused with the chant of protesters. Governments teetered on the edge. German flags were burnt. Outside parliament, Greece faced crashing out of the euro. It was a dark time. Perhaps it is the cloudless August sky that radiates a positive light. But there is now a glimmer of something. Hope, perhaps. Six straight years of recession are on track to end soon. The economy has contracted at its slowest pace since the downturn began. Bitter recriminations from the Eurozone have become warm words of encouragement. The deficit has been wiped out, and tourism this country's lifeblood and is flowing once again. After staying away during the crisis, almost 20 million holidaymakers are expected to enjoy Greece's pristine coast and whitewashed villages this year, double the number of four years ago. Greeks always tell you of their favorite sea, their perfect beach on the island of their choice. I have never known a nation so proud, justifiably so, of its country's natural beauty. But this year, hordes from across the world are joining them. At Crete's main airport, at Aklion, I watched charter flights land every five minutes from Berlin, Tel Aviv, Moscow. The place was heaving. New hotels are opening up, and new markets too. The Chinese flocking in, promising to build a new airport in Crete to cope with demand. But down the road, There are people like Nikos Bridzolakis, a pensioner. We talked at the spot in the city of Heraklion where three months earlier his wife, unable to cope with debt and new taxes, had thrown herself from a high wall. Her suicide attempt didn't succeed, and now she lies in hospital, semi paralyzed and barely able to speak, gripping a postcard with a picture of Christ, her faith still somehow enduring. In tears, he told me of the decent life he used to lead before the crisis hit, and of the despair that now reigns. Then there are those like Safras Malik, a Pakistani man attacked this month in Athens by suspected members of the ultra nationalist golden dawn party, his jaw broken as Greece's social fabric has torn. Almost 10% voted for the neo Nazis in the European elections this year, despite the leaders being charged with forming a criminal group. How much has really changed, I wondered, in the three years that I've been covering this wonderful but maddening country? Tax collection has only marginally improved. The evaders are still everywhere. An upmarket clothes shop in Athens recently offered me a 30% discount if I didn't need a receipt. Greece is still ranked the most corrupt member of the eu. One in four Greeks is without work. The country's public debt is as unsustainably high as before. Privatization is woefully behind schedule, and at busy food handouts and overstretched hospitals, they see no improvement. So stability, yes, but recovery? Not really. Greeks are tired of protests, aware that the placards and slogans haven't changed government policy, hopeful that the worst is behind them. But economic jargon about deficit reduction and positive growth doesn't mean much when your salary or pension has been slashed in half. Without the rioting on the streets and euro jitters cross, Greece is no longer making the headlines. But the story's not over. And as the emotion of leaving a country with which I have fallen deeply in love seems hard to bear, I take solace in the likelihood I'll be back soon, perhaps to cover the crisis if it rears its head again. I hope those friends who had looked forward to quieter humdrum times in Greece will be glad to see me.
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And that's Mark Loen. Now, surely the most controversial item of clothing of all is the headscarf or hijab. This simple piece of cloth has the power to polarize whole countries and societies. It's been the centre of news stories from Peshawar to Paris. It's triggered debates about religion and the state, about freedom, supposed modesty and feminism. Sometimes the decision whether or not to Wear it is one woman's alone. And my colleague Shaima Khalil, who's worn one for a decade, has just decided that for her, it's no longer appropriate.
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My family's old photo albums from the 50s and 60s speak volumes about Egypt's social and political change. Not just because of the men, lots of my relatives in army uniform, but because of the women. There they are in short sleeved dresses, impeccably cinched at the waist. The dresses of some of the younger ones actually stopped well above the knee. And the hair, the beautiful and complicated hairdos that my aunties and their friends pulled off using just to go shopping or to their universities, looked like something out of a vintage Glamour magazine. But times change. In the 80s and 90s, the strict Wahhabi version of Islam was arriving in Egypt, brought back by the millions of Egyptians who'd gone to work in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. Political Islamic movements were gaining ground too, most notably the Muslim Brotherhood. Soon, all the adult women in my family were wearing the headscarf or the hijab. The debate on whether or not it's an Islamic obligation for women is a long, complicated and at times a hostile one. An often quoted verse in the Quran urges Muslim women to cover their heads and part of their chests. But Islamic scholars interpret that in different ways. They also can't agree on a hadith or a teaching of the Prophet Muhammad in which he points to the face and the hands of a woman, indicating that everything else should be covered up. I didn't start wearing the headscarf until I was in my 20s, and I wasn't forced to do it, despite several years of pressure from my mother. What are you waiting for? She'd ask. What if something happens to you? Will you meet God looking like this? She would say, pointing at my trousers or my T shirt. Sometimes I would nod, smile and walk away. On other occasions, I'd fight and argue. But deep down, it was becoming ingrained in me that wearing the headscarf was the right thing to do. So towards the end of 2002, I decided it was finally time to do the right thing. So in the next 10 years, during which I moved to London and started working at the BBC, I wore the hijab. My motto. I'm a BBC journalist, not a headscarf wearing BBC journalist. There were some raised eyebrows outside the corporation when I appeared on tv. How could the BBC allow a woman in a headscarf to go out reporting? Fortunately, that was never an issue with any of my editors. Then last Year, I went through a very personal and private journey of questioning many things about my religion, about practice and belief. What was I doing out of conviction and what, out of habit? How much of my faith did I want to exhibit? Would I, I asked, finally and crucially, be any less Muslim if I took off the headscarf? The final answer was no. So after months of indecision, the day came when I decided to remove. Took me hours to get dressed, and when the time came when I'd normally put the headscarf on, I just didn't. For the first time in more than 10 years, I started considering my hair. Did it look right? What about those gray hairs? What would happen if it rained? Finally, it was time to leave the house. That was very difficult. It took me 30 minutes just getting out of the door. I kept running back to the mirror. Are you sure? Are you sure? When I finally made it out onto the street, a million thoughts went through my head. Perhaps God would punish me for this somehow. Would people on the street look at me and say, shaima, what have you done? Well, of course, none of that happened. Most of my friends, family and work colleagues were supportive, if curious. Some were disapproving. I was accused on social media of abandoning my religion. That's simply not true. I'm still Muslim, just not so visibly. The reaction I was most frightened of was my family's. One relative said to me on the inna lillahi wa inna ilahi raja'. Un. To Allah we belong, and to Allah we shall return. Now, that's a prayer you say normally when someone dies or there's been a catastrophe. And now, just to add to the major changes of this eventful year, I'm taking up a new position as the BBC's Pakistan correspondent. Oh, the irony. It means, of course, that after finally plucking up the courage to cast off the headscarf, the I'll have to start wearing it again. At least some of the time. It's just as well I didn't throw all my old headscarves away.
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And with Shaima Khalil reflecting on that big decision, we've reached the end of another edition. There'll be more from our own correspondence next Saturday morning, same time, same place. Why don't you join us? Goodbye.