← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
The Silent Wards
00:28:08
Kate Adie introduces correspondents stories from around the world. This week Gabriel a...
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Hello from the from our own correspondence
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studios at Broadcasting House in London, you've downloaded the latest edition of the programme
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broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
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It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today, Pakistan is in turmoil again. What's really behind it? We visit the silent hospital wards of Israel. In a museum, our man comes face to face with President Putin, but is unnerved by his skin and the popular board game that urged German soldiers in the trenches to stay calm. The government has announced that it will be sending weapons directly to Kurdish forces fighting Islamic State militants. Up to now, the UK has sent humanitarian aid and non lethal military equipment. The Americans have continued to use drones to target IS fighters. This has helped Iraqi government and Kurdish forces retake some territory lost to Israel in the last few months. Gabriel Gatehouse has just been spending a nervous time with fighters in northern Iraq.
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The road is 100% safe, said Ali as he unfurled a large map. Here are we. He pointed. This is Amali and Islamic State are still here. Here and here. He jabbed with his finger. It all looked uncomfortably close. Ali, a former officer in Saddam Hussein's army, now a commander in the Badr Brigade, a Shia militia group which is trained and funded by Iran. Ali, an ethnic Turkoman from Amerli, a besieged Shia town surrounded by Sunni villages. We set off following Ali's pickup truck packed with fighters, wielding guns and rocket propelled grenades. The day before, with the help of American air strikes, the militia had punched a hole through the ring of Islamic State fighters that had encircled the town for nearly three months. We began driving along a dirt track through the desert, skirting around Amerley to the east. The idea was to put distance between ourselves and the remnants of is, but we couldn't have advertised our arrival in a more public manner. As our convoy of four little cars churned up a dust cloud that must have been visible for miles around. How confident was Ali that he knew exactly where the IS were? Very, he said. I was not so sure. We halted suddenly at a village by the name of Suleiman Beg. Pockmarked buildings and burnt out vehicles lined the road. In the distance, thick black smoke was billowing into the sky. Not far off, a shot rang out and then another. Ali turned our convoy around and began driving back the way we'd come. Then, without explanation, we turned off the track, bumping over the desert towards an abandoned building. I tried to keep my fear of an IS ambush at bay, to keep the images of beheaded journalists out of my mind. I focused on the now. What was going on had our route been blocked or were we lost? Neither seemed like an appealing prospect. We stopped again. Follow in our tracks. Exactly. Ali shouted as he turned his pickup around again. Why? I asked. Landmines. Someone shouted back. We eventually made it onto a tarmac road and into Amerley. The people of the town looked like they'd been subsisting on pure adrenaline for the past two and a half months. They lined the streets in small groups, men and women, young and old alike, waving coloured sheer flags and cheering. As our little convoy progressed along the main street into town, I was desperate to get out of the car and start asking questions. How had they held out against IS while all around them had fallen? Many of the inhabitants had left town. So who'd done all the fighting? And what did they have to eat? But Ali wasn't stopping. We drove on until we arrived at a house on a back street. He jumped out of the pickup, his eyes burning, his movements focused and purposeful. He was looking for his parents. He knocked on the tall green gate. No answer. He shouted and banged again. He scaled the wall and opened up from the inside. But no one was home. For a terrible moment, it seemed as if we might have travelled this dangerous road with Ali, only to find tragedy at the end of it. But there was good news. Ali found his elderly mother sheltering at the home of a relative. They embraced for the first time in three months. Mother and son wept as fear and uncertainty dissolved into tears of relief. Both were healthy and well. Ali bent down and kissed his mother's feet. The house soon filled up with relatives and neighbours. Two young boys were pushed forward through the crowd. Abdallah and Abdel Hadi, aged 10 and 12, stumbled forward. Each was clutching a Kalashnikov rifle. My nephews, Ali beamed. These are the heroes of the siege. At first I was inclined not to take that literally. Surely, I thought they hadn't sent 10 year olds out to fight against is a group so brutal, so fearsome, that the Iraqi army, trained and equipped by the Americans at the cost of billions of dollars, had turned and run rather than stand and fight. But the townspeople of Amali insisted it was true. They were under siege, they said, not only by the invading forces of the Islamic State, but but also by the people of the surrounding Sunni villages. They needed every last fighter. For the people caught up in this desperate war, the sight of a young child brandishing the planet's most widely used instrument of death has become a thing not of horror, but of pride.
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Gabriel Gatehouse with the gun, toting children of Iraq Ever since the country was created in 1947, Pakistan's politics have been littered with military coups, assassination and accusations of corruption. Now thousands of demonstrators have paralyzed the capital Islamabad, demanding the resignation of the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. Mr. Sharif won a landslide victory last year in the country's first ever democratic transition. But the protesters, led by the former cricketer turned politician Imran Khan and a Sufi cleric, say those elections were rigged. Shahzeb Jilani has been talking to the protesters.
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Nadia ali is an 18 year old university student in the eastern city of Lahore. But she recently has been camping on the streets of Islamabad with her family. They joined thousands of protesters who descended on the capital last month seeking to oust an elected prime minister. She's been living in a tent in front of the Pakistani Parliament. Despite the monsoon heat and rain more than three weeks on, she's showing signs of exhaustion, but she says she's determined to carry on until they overthrow what she calls Pakistan's corrupt and unjust political system. When violence erupted between police and demonstrators in the last week of August, Nadia was part of a team of female volunteers who attended to the injuries of fellow protesters. Anti riot police had fired tear gas and rubber bullets to push back the marchers trying to get to the Prime Minister's house. The mob used patterns and threw stones at police. At least three people were killed and about 500 were wounded. You seem to have done your bit. Shouldn't you be heading back to university now? I asked her. Not yet. Revolution first, then education, she said, looking deadly serious. Then she posed a counter question. What's the point of pursuing a university degree in a system where people like me would never be able to find a decent job because we can't afford to pay a bribe and because we don't have the right political connections? We have to change the system first, she said. Nadia's lack of faith in Pakistan's current democratic order is shared by millions. I hear it all the time during my travels across the country. The anger is invariably directed at the growing disconnect between the country's political class and its ordinary citizens. It makes young people like Nadia question what democracy means in a country where most established parties are run by rich and powerful dynasties who treat their respective constituencies as their personal fiefdoms, where lines between crime and politics are blurred, and where police, courts and bureaucracy serve mainly the elite, all in the name of democracy. There's no question Pakistan's electoral process is deeply flawed. I've watched it closely since the late 80s, and I can tell you that from the way the polls are organized to the way the votes are counted, the process lacks fairness and impartiality. Election staff handpicked by the elite, bogus voting rigging and violence are all part and parcel of ballots here. Traditional parties have mastered the charade so well that despite public support, new parties often don't stand a chance of breaking the status quo. Angry protesters like Nadia are probably too young to remember that Pakistan has been down this road before. During the 1990s, often referred to as the Lost Decade, four civilian governments were brought down every couple of years. It was like a game of musical chairs in which Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif took turns to dislodge each other on charges of corruption and misrule. The army instigated the mudslinging matches. The politicians played along. The army wanted Pakistanis to believe that this country is not fit for democracy. And from the way politicians behaved, many people became fed up with the idea of democracy too. Still, Pakistan and its politicians have evolved over the years. The country appears to have come up with a broad political consensus that the military has no business meddling in politics. In the current crisis, the parliament, including opposition parties, has backed the government to stand its ground. But protesters like Nadia see it as just another attempt by members of the corrupt elite to cover each other's backs. There's also a wider public realization that while politicians may be pathetic at their jobs and may lack the will to drive change, that should never be a good excuse for the generals to undermine or dislodge them, at least overtly. That's a big leap for a country which has repeatedly suffered from military coups and where the generals are always believed to be lurking in the background. That's why many Pakistanis have watched with skepticism the recent anti government protest in Islamabad. The message of these sit ins is populist and appeals to the disenfranchised like Nadia. But in the end, it failed to draw the kind of numbers the organizers had hoped for. So where does it leave Pakistan? Perhaps Pakistanis are not too keen on the revolutionary ideas expounded by leaders like Imran Khan and the cleric Tahirul Qadri. Perhaps they just want to get on with their lives without subjecting this country to more upheavals. Perhaps Pakistanis have more patience than the few thousand committed protesters in Islamabad for the painfully slow incremental change that comes with having an imperfect democracy.
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Shahzeb Jilani. Yesterday, a truce was agreed in eastern Ukraine, supposed to end five months of fighting. Earlier NATO leaders in Cardiff had been blaming Russian President Putin for destabilizing eastern Ukraine. Moscow has denied that it's been training and arming the rebels. Around 2,600 people have been killed in the fighting so far, and the United nations estimates that more than a million people have left their homes. Now. It's not often that journalists can question President Putin directly. John Sweeney tried recently.
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The Mammoth Museum in Yakuts, eastern Siberia, is the place to go if you're keen to see stuffed prehistoric beasties, fossilised tusks and Vladimir Putin. He bounced up the steps and was greeted by the local governor, handpicked by the Kremlin, his missus. And then it was my turn. I've grown a big beard which has gone white. Mr. Putin must have mistaken me for a professor of paleontology down on his luck. The President of Russia shook my hand and I asked him about the killings in Ukraine. He'd said something non committal, turned to his right and inspected the mammoth skeleton. I'd waited 14 years for this moment, ever since I'd seen the second war in Chechnya at first hand. And he'd gone damn and blast and then suddenly, blow me. He was back, zooming past with his press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, blocking me. I'd like to ask you a question about the war, sir, I boomed. The killings in Ukraine. Thousands are dead. Ukrainian, Russian, Malaysian, British, Dutch. I was thinking of the dead of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in July. I'd been to the site, smelt the ghastly mix of aviation fuel and the stink of the dead, seen the belongings of the modern world on the move litter a field in eastern Ukraine. This was a monstrous crime. I've spoken to eyewitnesses who saw a missile launcher on rebel held territory that dreadful day. The evidence points indirectly towards the Kremlin and its proxies. Do you regret the killings in Ukraine? I asked. Mr. Putin wheeled round and said something in Russian. Peskov, play translator. I'm going to answer. The President blamed the government in Kiev for the war and their failure to talk to the rebels in the east of their country. As he talked, or rather lectured, he stared at me. He's good at staring, Mr. Putin. I stared right back as he bashed out his lengthy answer. He spoke of how the Ukrainian army was shelling civilians in their homes in eastern Ukraine. I'd been to Donetsk and seen evidence of this, the everyday stupidity of war. A Ukrainian shell had whizzed into the maternity hospital. Happily, the doctors had moved everyone down to the cellar. Beforehand, under the pipes, in a dimly lit corridor, a baby snoozed in the arms of his mother, not yet a day old, and he'd only known war. But stupidity and worse are not the gift of just one side in a war. I remember in Chechnya, 14 years ago, I came across evidence of war crimes of the Russians bombing a white flag convoy using vacuum bombs against civilians. I'd met a woman who unwrapped a cloth for me, and in it were the two black carbonized heads of her sisters, incinerated by Russian shelling of their home. Thank you, Mr. Putin. She screamed. The president had a point about Ukrainian attacks on civilians, but there is a counter argument that the Kremlin has encouraged the war in Ukraine and sent in tanks and troops to fight it, and lied about that. Back in Russia there are fresh graves of Russian soldiers who've lost their lives in Ukraine, and the journalist who told that story has been beaten up. Mr. Putin was still talking at me in the flesh. He is astonishingly petite. In Ukraine, our Russian speaking fixer mocked my white beard, calling me Prokoi died Moroz or Bad Grandfather Frost. If I'm bad Santa, then I guess Putin could be my elf. There's also something weird about his face. It has a plastic sheen about it. I wonder if he's had a close encounter with Botox, perhaps at the suggestion of his chum Silvio Berlusconi. Whatever the cause, his skin is stretched and taut and somehow unhuman, like something you'd find in a waxwork museum. The staring game continued under his eyes. There was a strange puddle of moisture, as if the waxwork was beginning to melt. Eventually he blinked first. He came to the end of his long answer, blaming the Ukrainians and Peskov. The end of his long translation. All the best, Mr. Putin said, and started to leave. I asked, but what are the Russians doing, sir? But he was off, and the way to him blocked by a wall of the Kremlin security people. Once he'd gone, they turned to look at me and I swear it felt like a frost had descended on the room.
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Bad Santa John Sweeney, and you can see more from him on Panorama on BBC one on Monday evening. The news from Israel, of course, has been dominated recently by events in and around Gaza. On this program, though, we like to give ourselves the space to examine other aspects of life and death. In January this year, the former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon died after eight years in a coma following a massive stroke. In many other countries, the machines keeping him alive would have been turned off earlier. Jewish law forbids people ending a human life, as Claudia Hammond discovered in Jerusalem. The result is that large numbers of hospital patients spend years on life support.
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After surviving Auschwitz as a small child, only to find herself without a family home after the war, Haver, who's now 80, made a promise to herself when she grew up, she would have her children young, provide them with a warm home. And then, after they'd left, she and her husband would have a second childhood. And this time, it would be a happier one. For a while it was. But then her husband developed heart disease and one day, at the age of 71, he collapsed. For the past 12 years, he's lain in a bed in a converted psychiatric hospital up in the hills on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Like all the other patients here, he lies silently with a large tube coming from a hole in his throat, breathing air into his lungs. Hava spends six hours a day at his bedside. I try to talk to him, she tells me. I let him know he's not alone, he's unconscious. But she thinks the one voice he recognizes is hers. I try to keep him alive, she says, so long as he has a warm hand. That's something. A few patients are propped up on pillows. The odd one stares into the distance. But for the most part, each bay contains people who look as though they're sleeping somehow, suspended in limbo between life and death. At the nurse's station, there's a CCTV monitor where all 20 patients can be viewed on one screen and you see very little movement. There are 20 images of sleeping people. In most countries, a ward like this would not exist, and doctors and families in discussion together might have made the decision to turn off Hava's husband's ventilator to allow him to die. But since 2005, this has been illegal in Israel and is considered to be killing the patient, even if they're already dying. The law in Israel was informed by Jewish tradition, but talking to families of other faiths in the hospital here, it seems to have become a cultural viewpoint too. When I visit the children's ward, there are colourful mobiles, wall freezes and the tinny sounds of piped nursery rhymes. There are 22 children here, and it feels like any other children's ward, except that here it's all the more noticeable that something is missing. And that's any sound from the patients. Some survived drowning, others got caught up in something like a curtain cord which accidentally strangled them. It's as though they've been left for an afternoon nap and except that they don't wake up. And over the years they grow, of course. I meet Ellie Cohen, whose daughter was only three years old when she choked on her own vomit during the night, starving her brain of oxygen. He tells me she was a very, very sweet girl, but there's very little chance of recovery. She's now 14 and looks like a teenager. Her sisters visit her every day to keep her up to date with the family events which she will never attend. Even exactly what she's thinking we don't know, her father says to me. As an ultra Orthodox Jew, he says he believes that what has happened to her must have occurred for a good reason. But even now I sit next to her and cry, he says. Yet the doctors seem to encourage a sense of hope. One tells me hope for a miracle is a fundamental human trait. While I'm looking around the ward, another doctor comes up to tell me that a mother has heard that we're here and has requested that I come and speak to her adult son. She thinks that having the BBC here might be enough to wake him up. She looks expectant. I know I'm going to disappoint her. She's from Georgia and speaks no Hebrew, but through a three way translation she tells me, I've been here all day and all night for 11 years. Her son looks as though he's asleep and there seems to be a flickering behind his eyelids, but he too is unconscious after a cardiac arrest. Beside the bed, an old folded mattress leans against the wall alongside several giant checked shopping bags, a small fridge and a coffee machine. Although she doesn't speak the same language as any of the staff, his mother has made the ward her home. She now lives at his bedside, and her daughter, who works in a shop nearby, often visits too. His mother is determined not to leave his bedside in case he wakes up. My visit doesn't have that effect. Like Hover, she continues to sit beside her loved one. Hover says the whole experience has changed her. She's learnt to live day by day and has some advice for me. You can't live your life in the future. Do what you have to do now and not later.
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Claudia Hammond A hundred years ago today, on September 6, 1914, the decisive first battle of the Marne began. A few days later, French and British forces, reinforced by 6,000 soldiers who had to be rushed to the front in taxis, succeeded in pushing the Germans away from Paris, and so began the entrenchment of positions that would last until 1918. The next four years were undoubtedly bloody, but for the soldiers on both sides. There were also substantial periods of waiting, of finding something to do. And in Germany, Steve Evans says, that provided an opportunity for one inventor.
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There is, we know, a very big centenary underway in Germany exactly a hundred years ago. There was a momentous development and the revolution that ensued is being marked with great fervor. In village halls up and down the land, people sit round tables. There is discussion and moments of reflection punctuated with loud altercation. I refer, of course, to the invention of the board game Mensch Egere Dichnicht. It is a board game which was devised exactly a hundred years ago and became popular among German troops in the trenches. Families back home ordered them from the manufacturer, who would then dispatch them straight to the front line. In the midst of the mud and the slaughter, Mensch Egere Dichnich took off. It is still going strong, even in this age of computer games. Its name means man, don't get angry with me. It's the catchphrase of the game, because the whole point is to get your counters round a board and get your opponent's pieces to thrown off the board. You can think you're doing really well, just about to get your counter on the home square and suddenly your opponent, a member of your family, no doubt with a lucky roll of the dice, sticks his counter on yours and you're back to square one. Mensch egere dich nicht, don't get angry with me. I went to a tournament in in the town of Zul, in the densely wooded mountains and winding ravines of central Germany, not that far from the Czech border. There, people From, I'd estimate seven or eight years of age, up to their 70s and 80s, sat and threw the dice and shouted and called to each other, mensch egere dich nicht. Man, don't get angry. I asked the organizer, I, Almut Earhart, what the appeal was in the age of the Internet and computer games. On the Internet and the computer, she said, you're always alone. You have opponents on the Internet, but you don't see them, you can't see their faces and the joy on their faces. People here at the tables are not alone, nor were they in the trenches or more importantly, for the success of the game, in the hospitals in which the wounded were treated. The game was invented by one Joseph Friedrich Schmidt, who was an employee of the city of Munich, but who had three bored children to entertain at home. He devised the game with dice and counters and played it happily with an ever widening circle, including his neighbour's children. After a couple of years of this amateur fun, he decided to put it on the market. It only took off with the First World War. Schmidt had the very bright idea of making hundreds of copies of the game and giving them to hospitals used by the war wounded. Sales haven't slowed down in the succeeding century. There is, I think, something very German about the stubborn refusal of its citizens to move with the times. Of course, Germans embrace lots of aspects of modernity, forsprung durch technik progress through technology and all that. But one of the charms of the place is that old habits die hard. I shake hands with my colleague every morning and evening. There's a bakery on every street. We eat a proper lunch. A beef stew in the canteen today with sprouts. They cook seasonally. Goose with red cabbage on the menu in restaurants at Christmas. Cured herring in June. Fiffelinger a type of fine mushroom in late August. Pumpkin or Kirbys in October. There is a heartwarming eschewing of newness for the sake of it. Here in the Finance Ministry the lifts are ancient. They are those open lifts which continually move in a belt and which you step onto with some trepidation. I find old fashioned but effective. A fitting symbol for a Finance Ministry. The German way. Improve what works, keep what pleases people. Like a board game. It comforted shell shocked lads a hundred years ago and it is giving computer games a run for their money today. How comforting.
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With a deft throw of the dice. Steve Evans ending this game. There'll be more from our own correspondence next Saturday. Goodbye.