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From Our Own Correspondent
Underneath the Mango Tree
00:28:03
Despatches from foreign correspondents. Today: Tim Whewell on what's caused the savage...
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- [00:00]
BBC Presenter
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.
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Program Narrator
It's introduced by Kate Ad. Hello. Today, underneath the mango trees, a cauldron of hatred in the Central African Republic. Afghans defy threats from the Taliban, turning out in their millions to vote in today's election. Rattlesnakes, tarantulas and blazing heat. Illegal migrants face the dangers of a desert trek into the United States and a mystery that's baffled brilliant minds for a century and more. A book no one can read in a language that doesn't exist. So it seems it will be a few weeks yet before more peacekeeping soldiers from European Union countries arrive in the Central African Republic. The delay was announced earlier this week at a special meeting on the sidelines of a summit of European and African in Brussels. Eventually, a thousand EU soldiers are due to be deployed. The International Committee of the Red Cross says with killing, rape and looting all on the increase, the situation in the car is getting worse by the day. People there, according to the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, are suffering deplorable atrocities. Tim Whewell has been looking at what's caused this breakdown in law and order.
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Tim Whewell
You can always tell where there used to be a village by the sudden profusion of mango trees in the middle of nowhere. They're my favourite tree, their leaves so much glossier, more deeply emerald than those of any other. Their shape at a distance more satisfyingly round. At this time of the year, much of the fruit is still small, hard and green. It's difficult to imagine how by June, the ground below will be covered in a rotting yellow squelch, the aroma more sickly than sweet. But it passes the time to try to imagine it as you bump and jolt for hour after hour down the rutted ribbons of red dirt that pass for highways in the Central African Republic. And try to guess where those who once lived under the mangoes have now moved on to. There's always been plenty of movement in the wide belt of Africa, where the savanna of the Sahel gives way to ever denser forest. In Sango, the national language, the word betene means roughly, stay out of trouble. I'm told that's what they sometimes called new settlements, founded by families who suddenly decided to get up and leave their home villages to escape disputes with fractious neighbours. But there are bigger migrations, too. A century ago, when they ruled the region, the French encouraged some of the semi nomadic pearl People known in English speaking countries as the Fulani, to move south from Niger and Chad to provide a better supply of livestock in Central Africa. The pearl are herders. They're also Muslim. So with the cattle came the Qur', an, part of a slow southward spread of Islam that's continued ever since. The farmer and the cowboy should be friends, but in practice they've clashed all over the world, all through history, from the Bible's Cain and Abel to Broadway's Oklahoma. And in the latest clash in the Central African Republic, it's cowboys, the pearl who've lost. Today, along those red roads, you don't need mango trees to tell you where people once lived. The empty shells of their houses and mosques are still standing, blackened and roofless. And you don't have to guess where the owners have gone. Many have been murdered, others forced to flee by a savage militia claiming to represent the country's Christian majority. Its ethnic and religious cleansing on a massive scale. Revenge on all Muslims, the militia says, for atrocities committed last year by some during a Muslim led rebellion. This tragedy, little noticed by the outside world, is about many things. The cauldron of hatred has been stirred by failed politicians who want to stage a comeback, and by the country's northern neighbour, Chad, covetous of Central Africa's resources. But it's partly about jealousy between those who had political power but were poor, the Christian majority and those excluded from politics, who seemed slightly richer. The Muslims, Central Africa's main traders and herders. For days and days on the road, I see no cows. Then suddenly, scores emerge from the bush. Massive dewlapped lyre, horned. But they're not driven by the pearl who must once have owned them. Instead, we're greeted by a group of scary young men waving machetes, bows and arrows and homemade hunting rifles. Their chests are swathed in the strings of little leather pockets containing magic bark and other charms they believe protect them from bullets. We've killed the pearl, they say. These are our cows now. They've also kidnapped some pearl women I glimpse huddled behind the herd and a tiny baby in a sling. The young men are part of a militia, the anti Balaka. You see everywhere along the roads. A force once raised, it said to fight highwaymen. Now they kill and burn under the slogan of Central Africa. For the Central Africans, suddenly all Muslims are foreigners, even if they've been here for generations. Hundreds of thousands of them are now sheltering in refugee camps across the border in Chad and Cameroon. But what about their cattle? Everyone worries now that there'll be a meat Shortage in Central Africa. The farmers needed the cowboys. No one else can look after or slaughter livestock properly. In Bazoom, a town which had thousands of Muslims until earlier this year, I'm told there are just two left. One's a madman, the other's a butcher. A tall, quiet man in a pink cap and gown who's been allowed or may be forced to stay because his skills are needed. I sit with him in his courtyard under the mango tree. Everyone has one, but he's too scared to tell me much about what's happened. He's very lonely, but he won't leave. This is where I belong, he insists. I look up at his mangoes. Maybe he will still be here to enjoy them in June, but the fruit of many, many other mango trees in the Central African Republic will go unpicked.
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Program Narrator
And that was Tim. The polling stations in Afghanistan close in an hour's time. People are voting for a new president. Hamid Karzai has come to the end of his 12 years in office. The three main candidates bidding to replace him, all former senior government ministers, have been crisscrossing the country trying to win over an electorate battered by years of conflict and corruption. It's been a complex election. Donkeys have had to carry ballot papers to some remote regions. Results from there could take weeks to come through. Lyn o' Donnell says that despite the Taliban doing their best to disrupt the polling, huge numbers of Afghans have been determined to cast their votes.
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Lyn O'Donnell
The message couldn't be clearer. If you vote, we'll kill you. The Taliban have been killing people every day in an intensified campaign across Afghanistan aimed at disrupting today's president vote. They still hope its outcome will have no credibility. It's become a familiar tactic in the lead up to elections in Afghanistan, and one that has not deterred millions of Afghans from participating in the democratic process. Long queues formed at voter registration centres as people defied the insurgents threat and claimed their right to a say in how their country is running. This determination has been met with fury. Kabul has been gripped by sieges and gun battles almost daily. Suicide bombers and gunmen have breached tight security known as the ring of steel to smuggle arms, ammunition, bombs and suicide vests to carefully selected targets and wreak as much death and damage as they can before they kill themselves or are killed. In recent weeks, this ring of steel has tightened to a paramilitary grip. On main intersections, heavily armed police stop all vehicles and rather than just peer through the windows, open doors, bonnets and boots, searching for weaponry and any tell tale sign that the figures in turbans and burqas are insurgents in disguise. On the evening of the spring equinox, the Persian New Year known as Nowruz, teenagers in Shawwar Khmeez smuggled tiny handguns into Kabul's five star Serena Hotel and shot dead my friend and colleague Saadar Ahmed, his wife Humeira and two of their three small children all were shot in the head at point blank range. Saadar's youngest son, Abuzar, emerged from a coma three days later and is making a steady recovery. Sardar was a good friend and one of the best reporters I've ever worked with. He was passionately committed to a democratic and modern future for his country. I didn't believe he was dead until I saw his coffin draped in the green, red and black Afghan flag carried into Kabul's Eidgar Mosque. I watched as it was lowered into the ground. A man with a small spade covered it in grey dirt. Friends among them grown men, threw their arms around me, sobbing. Can you believe it? They wept. Afghans have learned to deal with their sorrow by sharing it. But it just never seems to end. Every day across Afghanistan, families and friends hear the news that a loved one has been killed in a Taliban attack. On March 21, after hearing that Saadar was missing and joining the effort to track him down by phone, text, email, Facebook message, it my turn to hear that someone I loved was dead. Sardar's death was just another wrong place, wrong time tragedy in a war of no reason. Conspiracy theories swirled as people tried to find sense in the senseless. Members of Afghanistan's feisty free media took Saadar's death personally and after his funeral, rallied in the rain outside the Serena Hotel to condemn the Taliban. But for ordinary Afghans who did not know Sardar, it was the murder of his children, 5 year old Nelifar and Omar, 3, that cut deepest. This is the worst spat one of my friends. They were babies. Even snakes don't harm their young. So who are these people who take life so easily? Nada Nadari, a human rights campaigner, has met the young men recruited into the Taliban. They're taught to hate in the madrasas of Pakistan, he told me. They don't want others to be happy. They have no joy or love in their lives, he said. They're full of hate, which is why they can kill themselves to kill others. By breaching security and undermining intelligence, the Taliban have finally made everyone in Kabul aware of what they've known deep down for years that no one is safe anywhere at any time. An attack typically begins with the explosion of a suicide bomber or a car packed with explosives, followed first by silence, then sirens wailing, dogs barking and the staccato pop, pop, pop of gunfire. Kabul's traffic choked, streets empty. Helicopters hover overhead, security forces rush to the area and a gun battle ensues. The attackers are blown up either when they or police gunfire detonate their suicide vests or they're shot dead. The police chief declares the siege over and the dead are counted and then the traffic and indeed life itself return to what passes for normal in Kabul.
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Program Narrator
Lyn o' Donnell the start of the Indian election is two days away and still there's no sign of a manifesto from the opposition Hindu nationalist bjp. When it is eventually published, the documents expected to outline how, if elected, the party would create 250 million new jobs over the next 10 years. The BJP's candidate for prime minister is Narendra Modi. He's highlighting the economic development he says he's brought to his home state, Gujarat. Our Rittala Shah has family roots there and has been to see what changes there have been. But first, some food.
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Rita La Shah
It was late and I'd missed dinner. I wanted a snack, perhaps a sandwich. But on the menu was one of my favourite Gujarati dishes, roorklo, an unleavened bread made from millet flour. The moist, crumbly dough is rolled into a ball and flattened into a circle in the palms of your hand. It's cooked on a curved clay plate which is placed directly onto the gas flame or fire. It's cheap, traditional food, eaten by rich and poor alike, and it has a certain symbolic value. In many Gujarati families, the ability to make a large round rotla is considered to be a test of a new daughter in law. It's one I failed abysmally more than 20 years ago and would struggle to pass. Even now, this smoky, chewy flatbread is fed to new mothers. It's usually part of the simple meal held after a funeral as it's considered to be a wholesome, tasty food that everyone can afford to serve. Rotla's best eaten hot and slathered in butter. But when I was young, I'd happily eat it cold and plain, washed down with water. If my mother caught me, she'd get upset and pour me a glass of milk and put the butter down in front of me. Only poor people and prisoners are forced to eat like this. Now spread the butter on what's left. I didn't argue the way rotla's cooked and eaten hasn't changed for centuries, even among families like my own who left India a hundred years ago. But though the bread hasn't changed, Gujarat, where it comes from, is changing. This western Indian state has enjoyed double digit growth for more than a decade, and there's talk about whether its development model can be replicated across India. A tour of the state's industrial hub, Ahmedabad is an easy way to grasp the scale of the change. In the city's old heart, historic mosques and temples jostle for space amid a maze of narrow, crowded streets and countless small shops. Just a short distance away, a new Ahmedabad is growing up here. The roads are wide and lined with modern hotels and huge malls. Gujarat's economic success, its modernity and wealth is on full display. The riverfront park is part of the new Ahmedabad, created along one bank of the city's Sabarmati River. It's a tranquil green space with children's play areas and spaces to walk and relax. There's an entrance fee, a token 10 rupees. Just a few pence, but enough to ensure India's poorest can't afford to visit. The official poverty line in India is defined as living on less than 29 rupees per person per day. Travel a few miles west and you come to the suburb of Juhapura. Bisected by a highway, it's a mix of expensive apartments and slums. The huge municipal waste dump is nearby. On the side of the road, on a dusty patch of waste ground, is an encampment of about 200 people. Their homes are tents, patched together from scraps of fabric and plastic tied together with string. There's little protection from the elements. There's no running water or electricity. Children with dusty clothes and anxious eyes are sitting on a plastic sheet. They're chanting their times tables. The teacher is a volunteer. A bearded man in a long pink tunic tells me they've been living on this neglected spot for years. Some were displaced during the Gujarat riots of 2002, when almost 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in communal fighting with Hindus. Others were forced out by slum clearance in the city centre to make way for the riverfront park. A group of curious onlookers gathers round. Another woman explains how difficult it is to survive with little access to healthcare and other services. The misery is a stark contrast to the manicured optimism of the riverfront park. The official statistics show poverty is falling across India, but hundreds of millions have yet to benefit from the progress that's undoubtedly taking place around them. I didn't ask the man in the pink tunic if he could afford to eat Rotlo, but I suspect he may struggle to eat enough, even of what I'd always naively romanticised as an egalitarian pleasure. Gujarat is changing. It's wealthier, and its cake, or should I say Rotlaw, is getting bigger. But it may still be some time before the Rotlaw is big enough for some people to receive even a small share.
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Program Narrator
And that was Rita La Shah. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people cross into the United States illegally from Mexico. Many choose to take the risky route north through the Sonoran Desert of northern Mexico and southern Arizona. The bodies of hundreds of men, women and children are recovered from the desert. Most have died of thirst and heat exhaustion. The migrants have to contend with 40 degree temperatures by day and freezing conditions at night on their five day trek. This is rattlesnake country. There are tarantulas and coyotes too. Will Grant has been to Altar, the border town in Mexico where many begin their dangerous journeys from early morning.
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BBC Presenter
People start to congregate in the main plaza in Altar. Under a grey sky, the sun not yet high enough to warm their backs, rain pockets of men and women gather to share a coffee, a quesadilla or a cigarette. At first glance, they seem like any other rural workers in northern Mexico. The men wear caps and jeans, beaten looking trainers and boots. The women are dressed like the men. But Altar is unlike anywhere else in Mexico. Amid the furtive looks and conspiratorial chats, these people are on the move, plotting their route north. They have arrived from across Mexico and Central America, often enduring tremendous hardship to get this far. Now they stand huddled in small groups, barely 100 kilometers from their ultimate destination, the United States. Inside the church at the centre of the square, there is a prayer to the migrant brothers on the wall. Jesus, take pity on them and protect them, it reads, as they are mistreated and humiliated on their path. A young man and his sister are on their knees beneath those words, offering a few prayers of their own to the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's patron saint. Migrants often carry her image to protect them through the Sonoran Desert, on which Altar sits on the outer edge. Altar has become a reference point for crossing migrants. We can't stand by with our arms folded in the face of such suffering, says Padre Priscilliano Peraza, the local parish priest. Wearing a Stetson hat and cowboy boots rather than a dog collar, he doesn't look much like your average Mexican man of the cloth, an outspoken advocate for migrant rights. He once crossed the desert himself in solidarity with his undocumented flock. We should be very thankful for the migrants. We should protect them, he says, stabbing a finger in the air. 90% of our economy depends on what our migrant brothers spend here. A short walk around the town is enough to see what he means. Shops line the square, selling everything the prospective border crosser could need. There are T shirts, trousers and long sleeved hooded tops, all in desert camouflage to try to fool the border patrols. There are rucksacks. There are water bottles painted black so they don't reflect the sun when the border patrol guards look through their binoculars. And strangely enough, there are carpet slippers. The shop owner Victor, demonstrates how the elasticated slippers fit over the migrants shoes so they don't leave tracks in the sand. Not exactly the most practical footwear for a five day trek through the desert. But this journey is about stealth rather than comfort. The next morning, still dark outside, the padre took us to the border fence. It's a three hour journey along dirt roads through territory Run, we are reliably informed, by graffiti on a burnt out shack by the Sinaloa drug cartel. At the border itself, we climbed a small ridge and there the migrants were waiting to cross, resting in makeshift shelters of plastic sheeting and cactus to protect themselves from the punishing heat and fierce desert winds. The same men and women from the plaza in Altar were now dressed from head to toe in camouflage wear. You can see Jesus Christ walking among us, says the padre before quoting Matthew, verse 35. I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. Everyone had a similar story. Life was too tough in Guatemala or Honduras or rural Mexico to make ends meet. Or they were trying to get back to their families in the US after they'd been deported. One woman had her three year old child on her hip, another carried a baby. We stood looking into the United States, the land of opportunity, tantalizingly close. The the migrants, already thirsty, dirty and exhausted, staring at the inhospitable desert shimmering in front of them. They knew the hardest part of their journey was yet to come.
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Program Narrator
Will Grant in Mexico authors, agents, publishers, publicists and lawyers will all be gathering in London next week for the annual book fair. Plots will be discussed, deals will be done, marketing strategies will be devised. But at the end of it all, no one you can bet will be any the wiser about one of the great literary mysteries of our time, the Voynich manuscript. This controversial document won't be making an appearance in London. It's under lock and key in the American state of Connecticut. But Simon Worrells managed to take a look.
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Simon Worrell
I have come to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University to solve a mystery that makes the Da Vinci Code seem tame. A book no one can read in a language that doesn't exist. Illustrated with plants and creatures that have never been seen here on Earth. It's known as the Voynich manuscript after the second hand book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who claimed to have discovered it in Italy in 1912. Since then it's obsessed countless experts and generated numerous theories, both scientific and crackpot. My favourite is that it's the illustrated diary of a teenage space alien, jokes the Beineckest curator, Ray Clements, who left it behind on Earth. What surprises me is how small it is. I'd expected an album sized manuscript, but the book resting on a reading stand in front of me is about the size of a Penguin Classics edition. Bound in a limp vellum cover the colour of old ivory, it contains 240 richly illustrated pages. The illustrations look like something Timothy Leary might have seen on lsd. Strange plants and astrological symbols, jellyfish like creatures and what I think is a lobster. In one image, a group of naked pear shaped ladies shoot down what looks like a water slide. The text, written in brown Angol ink, reminds me of Tolkien's Elvish Some facts. Wilfrid Voynich was an ethnic Pole from Lithuania in what was then the Russian empire. Born in 1865, he was briefly imprisoned in Siberia for revolutionary activities before fleeing via Manchuria to London. In Soho, he set up a second hand bookstore which became a centre for political exiles. Among among them were Karl Marx and a Russian emigre who adopted the moniker Sidney Reilly and became known to posterity as the Ace of Spies. Voynich claimed to have stumbled on the manuscript at a Jesuit seminary outside Rome, the Villa Madragone. Appended to the manuscript was what purported to be a letter written in 1665 by Johannes Marcus Marci, a former physician of the Holy Ro Emperor Rudolph ii. It stated that the manuscript had once belonged to Rudolph and was probably the work of Elizabethan alchemist Roger Bacon. Since then it's been a Venus flytrap for brilliant minds. American William Friedman, one of the greatest cryptographers of the 20th century, spent 30 years trying to crack the manuscript's code. He went on to found an institution recently made famous by Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency. New theories breed like mayflies. A retired American botanist recently claimed that some of the plants are of Mesoamerican origin. A British applied linguist claims to have translated 10 words. So what is it? A cipher for buried treasure? A poisoner's handbook? The coded recipe for eternal youth? Spoiler alert. I believe the manuscript is a forgery by Wilfrid Voynich himself. One of the most common tropes in the history of forgery is that of a rare book dealer discovering previously unknown manuscripts. Voynich is known to have had just this magic touch. He is also known to have acquired a large supply of vellum and to have used his knowledge of chemistry, gained at the University of Moscow, to replicate medieval inks and pigments. Having forged the manuscript, I believe Voynich then did what numerous other forgers have done, create a second document, the letter purportedly found in the manuscript, to validate it and give it a plausible proven. But until forensic tests are done on the ink and pigments, so far only the vellum has been carbon dated to the 15th century. The riddle of this mysterious book will continue to exert a powerful magnetic pull on present and future voinicologists. To its deciphering, he devoted unflagging toil. Marchie wrote of the previous owner in the letter Voynich claimed to have found in the manuscript, as is apparent from attempts of his, which I send you herewith. And he relinquished hope only with his life.
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Program Narrator
The riddle of the Voynich manuscript solved, perhaps by Simon Worrell. And that's it. There'll be more dispatches, mysteries and stories from around the world next Saturday morning, so do please join us then. Goodbye.