Pre Order the New Book
Pre Order the New Book
- Fort Hood shooting sheds light on mental health issues in armed forces
- ExxonMobil signs deal to develop major oil field in Iraq
- Activists begin hunger strike to draw attention to climate change talks
- Reporter's Notebook: Getting the flu vaccine in Washington, D.C.
- California overhauls its water system in third year of drought
- Zelaya: Honduras compromise plan dead
- US wrap-up: Unemployment, health care and the single payer option
- Narco-violence spreading in Mexican border state
- Stasi survivors still waiting for justice
As the nation mourns the victims of Thursdays shooting at Fort Hood, Texas many are reflecting on the challenges facing men and women in the military. Suspected shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan was himself psychiatrist who counseled soldiers returning from war. FSRNs Tanya Snyder examines what happens when theres a crisis among mental health professionals in the armed forces.
Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell have signed a deal with the Iraqi Oil Ministry to develop a major oil field in Basra, southern Iraq. The 50 billion dollar deal is the first American-led venture into Iraq since the oil industry was nationalized in 1972. Its also the second major deal signed this week a signal that perhaps multinational oil companies are ready to return to Iraq and make huge profits.
We're joined by Charlie Cray. He's the director of the Center for Corporate Policy, a non-partisan public interest group based in Washington, D.C.
UN climate talks in Barcelona wound down today with little progress made in negotiations. Developing nations say rich countries like the United States which produce a disproportionate amount of the world's CO2 have pledged too little to reduce emissions. Meanwhile, with the Copenhagen Climate conference just a month away, activists and NGOs are trying to keep the pressure on governments to act decisively. In Australia, one group of activists IS already taking action - by going on a hunger strike. And, as FSRN'S Tom Allan reports, it's an idea that's spreading around the globe.
BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition
Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories
Democracy Now!
World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk
Tell us what you think
Silvio Berlusconi is one of my favourite politicians he's the panto villain you can boo and hiss and throw rotten veg at. He heavy-handedly dictates and pays his way through politics, and, seemingly, does little to hide it. Our own politicians do dodgy deals and cheat on their wives, but it only seeps out later. Give me a Berlusconi over the Uriah Heeps any day.
Kim Batty Hastings, East Sussex
What is the basis for John Hooper's claim in his article on Silvio Berlusconi that John Profumo paid Christine Keeler for her services? I know of no evidence for this. What the former war minister did cost him and his family dearly, but he did more than enough in the rest of his life to redeem himself.
Terry Philpot Limpsfield Chart, Surrey
Viv Groskop writes enthusiastically about enormous ladies well, size 14, at any rate modelling clothes, and that the fashion world is changing. Yet just a few pages later, the usual seriously slim ladies are modelling your recommendations in your All Ages shoot. Whose side are you on?
Ruth Coppard Sheffield
It's refreshing to note that a high-earning Hollywood star such as John Cusack retains such a grounded sense of social justice that he's as incensed as the rest of us at the bonuses Wall Street bankers continue to pay themselves. But hold on, aren't these the same guys who bankroll Sony, the makers of 2012, the disgustingly expensive blockbuster that Cusack graciously agreed to be interviewed about in order to boost its box-office takings? Or are they the guys who failed to bankroll the (unmade) Stopping Power, which resulted in Cusack suing the producers for $5.6m. Wouldn't that be $5.6m for work not actually done? A bit like the bankers' bonuses, then.
Declan Heneghan Liverpool
So Tim Dowling's children go to the park over the road to play with "local kids". Presumably there is something special about his kids that makes them not local, even though they live just across the road. Perhaps that's why the other children were following them.
Pamela Wales Ipswich, Suffolk
Awful to read that Tim was punched in the mouth. Was the assailant a regular reader of his column?
John Nancollis Stockport, Cheshire
To use Lucy Mangan's comparison, Saturday's Guardian is roughly equivalent to five stamps. For that, we get her column and the rest of the paper as a bonus. She needs retaining as a perpetual parcel, to be unwrapped and savoured at times of national absurdity.
Paul Walker Buxton, Derbyshire
Who selected the picture for Let's move to... Bury? Yards from the scene you used is a lovely railway bridge, Brooksbottom Mill and the River Irwell. Do renovated workers' cottages really symbolise the image of "It's not grim up north"?
Pat Long Bury
Yotam Ottolenghi's individual take on meat-free recipes is usually interesting, but I was underwhelmed by his Hot Carrot Salad on shop-bought crumpets. Was he secretly on holiday that week?
Amanda West Twyford, Berkshire
A bungalow whose only drawback is that the bathroom is downstairs (Wreck Of The Week). What stairs would those be, then?
David Collins Kidderminster, Worcestershire
Now have look at Your Pictures
Rich countries bullying poorer ones, mud-slinging and back-stabbing - environmental summits can be vicious
At 8am on Wednesday 7 October, a smartly dressed fiftysomething Filipino woman took the escalator to the first floor of the UN building in Bangkok and merged into a throng of diplomats, civil servants and environmentalists arriving for the eighth day of the ninth session of the global climate talks. She was met with a few respectful nods.
Bernarditas de Castro Muller "Ditas" to her chums chatted to a journalist and a colleague, and then went to work in conference room 1. She spread her papers in front of her, stood up and began to belch fire, tearing the flesh off three Americans and chewing two Europeans. After swallowing them whole, she sat back down.
She didn't, of course, but such is Bernarditas's reputation as a "dragon woman" in the epic UN climate talks which should conclude next month in Copenhagen that if she had, no one (least of all the US and British governments who seem to fear and loathe her) would have been too surprised.
In the outwardly polite yet vicious world of UN climate change diplomacy, where negotiators use every trick to further national interests and where battles rage over commas, colons and semi-colons, Bernarditas is seen by most poor countries as a heroic defender of their rights. But most rich countries paint her as a machiavellian, Soviet-style hardliner holding back an agreement to save the world.
Bernarditas is officially an environment adviser to the Filipino government, and lead negotiator and co-ordinator of the 130 developing countries in the umbrella group known as the G77 plus China. She negotiates in what is called "the ad hoc working group on long-term co-operative action (AWG-LCA) process under the Bali action plan". In short, she represents the interests of nearly two-thirds of the poorest people of the world in the climate talks.
It's her job along with a few other G77 negotiators to keep together the traditionally squabbling poor nations at least until the major power blocks like the US and EU inevitably split and outmanoeuvre them. She must wrest the best possible financial deal for them by insisting that the rich countries commit to deep CO2 cuts. She is a pivotal figure in the talks, a lightning rod for western distrust and for southern hopes.
But this sweaty Bangkok morning has started badly. Manila, the capital of the Philippines, 1,000 miles east, is literally under water following back-to-back typhoons and floods, and in the last few days there have also been a tsunami in Samoa and an earthquake claiming over 1,000 lives in Sumatra. Moreover, the climate talks on which UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has said "the future of this entire humanity" depends are deadlocked.
Environmentalists say the series of disasters should concentrate minds, but with just six full negotiating days before world leaders join the final conference of the parties in Copenhagen, the diplomats of 181 countries present in Bangkok have failed to agree on the big issues: what carbon cuts rich countries should make, how much money the poor should get to help them adapt to climate change, and where that money should come from. A draft text has been hacked down by negotiators from 250-odd pages to half that, leaving the UN bureaucracy optimistic but everyone knows it has been painfully slow.
In these talks nobody moves until everybody moves, so most of the big issues will now only be resolved by politicians in late-night horse-trading sessions at very end of next month's talks in Copenhagen. But right now in Bangkok another matter is brewing that threatens to derail the negotiations and which illustrates the immense gulf that exists between rich and poor countries.
The UN's Kyoto protocol, which has been signed by 184 countries and commits all the word's rich nations except the US to cut emissions, is the base of the present talks, but it has just come under massive attack. The US negotiating team, led by the bearded former climate thinktank scientist Jonathan Pershing, is playing traditional hardball diplomacy, stating categorically that it will not join Kyoto. There's nothing new in US intransigence on climate change, but in a dramatic development, Europe and Australia have just sided for the first time publicly with the US, arguing that the Kyoto treaty should now be ditched in favour of a new one to get the Americans on board.
The poor, represented mostly by the G77 and China, are outraged. Why should the whole world change, they ask, just to accommodate the US? This Bangkok meeting should have been spent negotiating how far rich countries were prepared to cut emissions after 2012; instead countries like India and China have been told they, too, must all come up with quantifiable plans to cut their emissions something not agreed before and the rich seem to be ducking their commitments.
If the climate talks are a game of diplomatic chess, the rich countries have just moved their white queen into the back row of the developing countries' territory. But have they underestimated the reaction this will get? Can the G77 and China now gain diplomatic advantage? Are the industrialised countries threatening the talks by wanting it all their own way? Or will their bold move lead to a genuinely global agreement?
Bernarditas, who insists she does not represent the views of the G77, is appalled. For her, the US and EU are not just illegally abandoning an international treaty but they are now jeopardising the credibility of international law and the UN system itself. She is contemptuous. "Do the rich countries have any sense of life in the least-developed countries?" she asks. "I doubt it."
"I say, aren't we all in this world together? Didn't we all sign this?" she says to a small audience in the UN coffee bar that morning, brandishing a well-thumbed copy of the 20-page Kyoto treaty.
She turns to page 7 where she has underlined paragraphs: "Look!" she says, jabbing the text with her index finger. "Article 4. It says 'shall'. That is legally binding. There are obligations here. The words are not there by chance. And there's the word 'fully'. We spent hours on that word. We agreed on it. Are they saying it no longer applies? These are very serious negotiations. The Kyoto protocol is not a statement from a high-level meeting when they [politicians] go 'blah blah'. They are not bound by that. Here they are bound. It's law! Why do they now want to kill Kyoto? A new agreement means we will have to go through ratification all over again. How long will that take? What if you do not ratify? What are we left with? If you throw this away? Every word in it means something important because it binds us to legal obligations."
To negotiate successfully at this level means you must understand your opponents and are able to argue all night. Bernarditas does that, but friend and foe say she has a special advantage because she is not only a stickler for detail but she knows the UN climate change convention and the Kyoto protocol word for word. And because her negotiating days go back to the Rio Earth summit in 1992 when the first climate change treaty was signed, woe betide any young pup of a rich country negotiator who strays from the precise words.
"She is the protector of the convention," says a colleague (in the world of diplomacy no one wants to be identified). "I'd hate to negotiate against her. She reminds me of Humpty Dumpty when he said to Alice, 'When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.' "
A western friend, who also asks not to be named, says: "She is used by the G77 and China as the bad cop, the experienced negotiator past whom the inexperienced, naive and unsuspecting cannot pass. She has an old style of Soviet negotiating. She can go on for 45 minutes easily. It's a method. It's attrition. Her start is from a stance of noncooperation. Success is seen as how much the opposition gives in, and how much you can extract. You have to start with something unbelievable and make concessions. Even the Americans quake in fear of her. She terrifies them."
Bernaditas herself says: "Few people have dealt with the talks since the beginning [like me] and can still remember what we wrote. The majority don't see what we fought so hard for. [They say] this or that sounds reasonable. But I say that the words matter. They don't mean the same thing to everyone but they determine the levels of the relationship. There are words that do not appear that we talk about for hours.
"I use their [the rich countries'] language. I spell it better. I don't make grammatical mistakes like they do. It angers them. I never get angry, I'm not subservient, nor impressed. They say, 'She cannot be right, she's only a woman and must be weak.' "
"Clearly she is successful," says a European observer. "They would not employ her otherwise. But it would please the annex 1 [industrialised] countries a lot if she were not there. She is very dangerous to their interests. She doesn't hesitate to remind them all the time that they are in breach of their obligations. They roll their eyes and say, 'There she goes again.' "
"Actually, she's really like my mum," says a young Malaysian barrister. "She is sweet but very authoritative."
Bernarditas de Castro Muller is a grandmother who lives in Geneva with her Swiss economist husband and is known among her colleagues for her sense of humour and babysitting skills. She has a house in Manila, and travels there regularly to see family, has lived in Kenya and worked as a full-time diplomat on just about every major global agreement on the environment of the last 20 years. Now, when she is not negotiating climate, she travels the world teaching diplomats from other developing countries how to negotiate.
"I am only a housewife, actually," she says. "My husband doesn't even trust me with the household budget. My education was totally western and I have spent most of my life in Europe. I am living in two worlds but I am at home in both. I see poverty and how people must live in developing countries but I am fortunately not poor."
Climate change is the most complex and satisfying of all the diplomacy she has done because it is science-based, it is about development, but mainly because there is so much at stake. Get it right, she says, and the world has the chance to both halt catastrophic climate change and find a better path to develop. Get it wrong and all the injustices and disadvantages that developing countries now face will be magnified 1,000 times in the coming years.
"Climate change is making the poor even more vulnerable and threatening to destroy their health and their homes," she says.
She was persuaded to fight for climate justice when she went back to live in Manila after the downfall of President Marcos in the late 1980s. "We happened to be chair of the G77. I listened to developing countries. I saw so much disadvantage there. The fact is they are very open and vulnerable. [It became clear] that the rich countries are freely exploiting, stealing practically, their resources. These countries do not have resources because they were so exploited in the past.
"I now see developing countries who have so little they get peanuts. They think if someone gives them anything they should be grateful. [But] developed countries have taken on obligations to provide money. This is not voluntary bilateral aid, or charity that we are negotiating from the annex 1 countries. This is a commitment.
"When we were negotiating in the 1990s, all of us were caught up in environment and development. We were full of ideals. We said, 'Yes, we have to do something, because the world is getting lost.' Now I tell the developing countries that I am not working for them but for their children's children and what we will leave the world."
Even seasoned diplomats find the talks surreal, with an arcane language, logic and a pace of their own. In three years, they have gone well beyond being just about emission cuts and now embrace development, trade, finance, carbon markets, forestry, science and technology. Because they are so complex, most nations belong to one or another of the negotiating blocs, like the G77, the EU, the Alliance of small island states, or the African group.
Negotiators are mainly anonymous civil servants who have some freedom to set positions but can hide from their public, which is mostly denied access to the talks. They admit to personal duels and tactical manoeuvres. Phrases that might protect the world's forests or condemn nuclear power may be there one day, but be removed the next, and no one can say why or who is responsible.
But as the talks have progressed, so the negotiators admit to becoming lost in their own verbiage. There have been long debates over whether a comma, a colon or a semicolon should be used in the text; arguments have raged about the meaning of "sustainable forest management" as opposed to "sustainable management of forests"; and hours have been spent by nations debating the differences between "economic development" and "sustainable development".
Now the talks have invented their own language. There are Bingos (business and industry non-governmental groups) who discuss Mrvs (measurable, reportable and verifiable), Namas (nationally appropriate mitigation actions) and Napas (national adaptation programmes of action). One important section is known as Redd (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation); another is called Lulucf (land-use, land-use change and forestry) which probably only 50 people in the world half-understand. Meanwhile, more than 100 "non-papers" have been issued which reflect nations' points of view without being formal positions.
"It is easily the most complex piece of diplomacy ever devised," says one British diplomat. "A set of interlocking negotiations taking place on parallel tracks, ranging from aviation to trade and forests to adaptation, finance and science. It's quite possible it will all collapse under its own weight.
"There are many people who try to keep the language incomprehensible. There's a relationship between power and transparency it's about keeping people out. The only people who really understand the lingo are the people who wrote it. It needs another industry of people to translate the words so they can be understood. I remember my first experience in the negotiations. I concluded after 25 minutes that I was in a madhouse. It was one of the most professionally disconcerting experiences of my life," he says.
He recalls seeing Bernarditas in action for the first time: "There was what was called the Gang of Four Bernarditas, a Chinese negotiator we called Professor No because he said no to everything, an Indian and a Saudi. They acted as the 'they shall not pass' group. Bernarditas was scary. You could imagine her as one of the Gang of Four in the Chinese upheavals. She and Professor No were fighting a 1960s ideological war in which the rich were trying to screw the poor and vice versa."
Several weeks later, this point was put to Bernarditas. "What do they mean by ideological war?" she thundered. "What are they saying? They should specify. What do they not like? What do they mean by 1960s ideology? Fidel [Castro]? The opening up of traditions? Opposition to the colonial mentality? They have to specify what! No, I don't live up to their prejudices of what is a third-world woman, that's what they don't like about me.
"But if they mean 1960s ideology in the sense of keeping economic gains, yes. They just do not accept they have historical responsibility. It's like I burn down your house and you become rich but now they say you can pay for it yourself. Well, you might be rich, but your brothers and sisters also lost their houses. Are you free from responsibility because one member of your family becomes rich?"
She says the dice are loaded against the poor. Africa is experiencing climate change faster and deeper than almost anywhere else, and could be devastated within 30 years, yet its 55 countries have been offered no money by the rich to adapt and can afford to bring only 145 official delegates between them to Bangkok just 8% of the total.
Europe, however, has more than 450 delegates, with the UK, Denmark and US numbering 142 between them. At least 50 countries have only one or two, but the WWF, a western conservation group, has a team of 50 to lobby, observe and advise delegations, as well as to brief the press. In comparison with the EU or the US, the G77 has no offices, no permanent staff and no budget to meet in advance of conferences. Moreover, while delegates from poor countries must grasp highly complex technical issues in their second or even third languages, big country delegations may bring legal advisers, interpreters and business consultants for each area of the talks, with many more experts held in reserve.
The US or Japan may fly in people to advise them on the precise wording of a single paragraph, and as the talks reach their climax, rich countries will have whole teams of people to take it in turns to be on the frontline of the negotiations, staying fresh while their less well resourced opponents are exhausted.
"Most developing countries don't have enough people, they don't even understand the text. They are exhausted after a few days and cannot even get to the meetings," says Meena Rahman from Third World Network, an NGO based in Geneva which has followed the talks for years. "They complain that they are marginalised, but there is nothing they can do. All the negotiations are in English and some just do not understand what is going on. It's accepted as a fact of life in the negotiations."
From a poor country's perspective, it is easy to suspect institutional bias. The executive secretary of the talks is Yvo de Boer, a Dutch diplomat, who himself has succeeded another Dutchman. His deputy is Canadian, and many of the senior secretariat and core groups are staffed by middle-aged white men. The media at the talks is mostly western and the language throughout is English.
"Of course we complain all the time," says an African diplomat. "If you control the process, you control the discussion and the texts. That's how you manipulate the outcome. It's very easy really."
Is this a sensible or fair way to go about re-ordering the world's economies to counter something as important as climate change? "No," says an exhausted Swedish diplomat in Bangkok. "It's quite mad."
As the talks conclude, the tactics get dirtier and the road to Copenhagen becomes increasingly ugly. Earlier this year, says Bernarditas, word was dropped by a British diplomat in a meeting with non-government groups that she was appearing overfriendly with the Saudi Arabian delegation because she had possibly accepted a house from them. The veiled accusation of bribery sped along the diplomatic grapevine. "It was outrageous," says Bernarditas. "I could not believe this."
But while she suspected a crude attempt to smear her, she was unable to prove anything and last week the head of the UK negotiations, Jan Thompson, said categorically that no official complaint had been received.
"It's quite inconceivable. Bernarditas does not even need the money. She is incorruptible. That's why they hate her," says one of her colleagues. "But she and the Saudis no longer sit near each other for fear that the rumours are restarted."
"It's an idiot putting that about. It will backfire. God, how stupid can you get!" said a British observer. "It's below the belt we should not think the Brits are immune [from these tactics]."
Bernarditas herself stays aloof. "Each one is looking for the weakness of the other. It's very vicious. But there are big commercial interests at stake. They exploit the weaknesses of people and exacerbate the differences between countries. It's part of the game," she says.
So, too, is the rhetoric now being employed by leaders of rich countries in the last crucial weeks before Copenhagen. In meeting after meeting, presidents and prime ministers have used apocalyptic language to insist that the future of the world is at stake and everyone must play their part. It plays well in the north, but in many developing countries it rings hollow, where it is seen as a precursor to blaming the poor if no deal is struck.
The rhetoric is reciprocated with the poor: "Developed countries have overconsumed their share of the atmospheric space they ate the pizza and left us the crumbs," said ambassador Anjelica Navarro of Bolivia. "They have a historical debt a historical responsibility. We want our atmosphere back, how you do that, developed countries, is your problem."
In a few weeks' time the talks will reconvene possibly for the last time in Copenhagen under the glare of the world's media and with the extra ingredient of high emotion brought by thousands of environment, human rights and development groups from around the world. But in diplomatic terms, the real talks are nearly over, having taken place behind closed doors between fewer and fewer countries. In the last month, there have been high-level meetings in London, Beijing, Delhi and Washington, with the US, Europe, Japan and the EU all trying to work out their position and agree what offer they are prepared to make.
"They are now working together to split the developing countries, in order to weaken their political positions and isolate them before they make them offers and get their way," says Rahman.
The way this is being done, she says, is via those countries who are most vulnerable to climate change. The British in particular have worked with the Maldives to form a new grouping, known as the "group of vulnerable countries", a set of small island states and least developed countries who stand to disappear beneath the waves or be most affected by drought and flood. Next week, Bangladesh, Kenya and others will meet with British financial help in the Maldives, with rich countries invited to attend.
"They can expect tempting sweeteners to break away from the G77, and threats if they do not play ball," says Meena Rahman, who is also a former chair of Friends Of The Earth International. "It looks brilliant in PR terms. It looks like the British are helping the weakest but they are really peeling off the poorest and weakening Kyoto and the treaty."
Robin Gwynn, UK special envoy for vulnerable countries, insists this is far too cynical a view, saying no country has done more than Britain to give the poor a real voice in the talks. "The effort has been very genuine. The moral case must be made to ensure a global deal."
But another diplomat sees the tactical advantage in working with the poorest. "If you can convince the most vulnerable countries that there is a serious funding offer on the table, then you can open up another front which helps a lot of third-party things. Tactics? It's never thought out before, it's always [negotiations] by the seat of the pants. There are too many events to react to. It's always chaotic. It's a weird game."
In the end, exhausted ministers from the three great power blocks, the US, the EU and China, will probably make a deal of sorts between themselves in the small hours of 17 December in Copenhagen. By then, the world's really poor countries will have long been diplomatically blown away from the negotiations with promises of cash soon and greater reward later. The G77 and its negotiators like Bernarditas will congratulate themselves for obtaining the best possible deal in the circumstances and the rich countries will insist the world is on a new, cleaner, greener development path.
There will be something for everyone because everyone wants something, and the politicians will be able to go home waving a communiqu that commits countries and industries to taking action to reduce emissions. Whether it is anywhere like enough, fast enough, to prevent a climate catastrophe, or is just or equitable, is another matter.
Because in western diplomatic terms, if there is not complete failure, then there can be one of only two outcomes to these climate talks. Copenhagen must be either a success or a great success. It may clearly be a fudge, or even a cop-out, but for the politicians who must sell it back home, nothing else in the world can be countenanced.
Join the 10:10 climate change campaign, which the Guardian is supporting, at 1010uk.org/
Sigrid Paul had just given birth when the Berlin Wall went up, dividing a city and in an extraordinary sequence of events separating her from her baby son. His first five years were in the west, while she was trapped in the east. Lena Corner reports
In January 1961, Sigrid Paul gave birth to a little boy in a Berlin hospital. Her first child, it was a difficult labour and the baby was whisked away to intensive care. As she lay recovering, Sigrid had no idea that little Torsten, as she had named him, would become inextricably and cruelly caught up in cold-war politics. Eight months later, the Berlin Wall would go up, initiating, says Sigrid, "a sequence of events with consequences beyond our wildest imagination".
It's the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Monday. Only now does Sigrid, 75, finally feel able to tell the story of how, nearly half a century ago, she and her son were trapped in a twilight zone between communist east and capitalist west.
They were embroiled in a nightmare of petty bureaucracy and paranoid Stasi officialdom, in which Sigrid had to beg to see her son and ended up spending two years in prison just for trying to be a mother. The Wall separated Sigrid from her little boy for the first five years of his life, and when they were reunited he had no idea who she was.
It all began when Sigrid arrived with her husband, Hartmut, at the Charit hospital on the east side of Berlin. Although the baby was in the breech position, there was a delay in finding a doctor. By the time an obstetrician arrived, "one leg was already out". Sigrid had an emergency caesarean section and Torsten was seriously injured during the process. His diaphragm was ruptured, his stomach and oesophagus were damaged and he had internal bleeding. It was touch and go whether he would live.
Although the city was divided into sectors, Sigrid and Hartmut were able to cross to the west and take Torsten to a hospital better equipped to deal with his injuries. "The Charit didn't have a clue what to do," she says. "But it wasn't a problem at that time to go to a hospital in west Berlin. The doctors there operated and saved his life."
Torsten was given an artificial diaphragm, oesophagus and antrum (stomach exit), and in July Sigrid was finally allowed to take him home. He was still fragile and needed medicine and special food, both only available in the west. Every Monday, Sigrid would travel across the city to pick up Torsten's life-saving package.
Then, on 12 August, everything changed. At midnight, the police and units of the East German army were given orders to close the border. Barbed-wire entanglements were rolled out and the building of the Wall began. By the time Sigrid woke on the 13th, the route from east to west was closed. She applied for a permit to the west to obtain Torsten's food and medicine but was refused. "Our baby food is good enough," was the reply from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) health ministry.
Within days, Torsten started coughing up blood and Sigrid took him back to the Charit hospital in east Berlin. There, a doctor named Schneeweiss did everything he could. He pumped Torsten's stomach, but he got sicker and his temperature got higher. Sigrid was beside herself. In the early hours of the morning, Schneeweiss sent her home. "Years later, Dr Schneeweiss told me what happened," says Sigrid. "He realised that neither he nor any other doctor at the Charit could help. The only doctors who could help were on the other side of the Berlin Wall."
Transferring patients across the Wall was now forbidden, with one exception heart cases. Schneeweiss knew Torsten could die if he stayed in the east. He confided in another doctor and together they falsified Torsten's papers and listed him as a heart patient. Schneeweiss had sent Sigrid home so he could illegally spirit her baby to the other side of the Wall. "That was the moment Hartmut and I were separated from our sick child," says Sigrid. "Torsten's life was saved by a piece of benevolent deception schemed up by two doctors." The decision was to shape the rest of their lives.
While she and Hartmut will always be grateful to Schneeweiss for saving Torsten (he remains a family friend), the baby was alone in west Berlin and access to him was up to the ministry of the interior. "Every day I went from one authority to another to try to get permission to see him, even for an hour or two," she says. "It was futile. Every application was rejected. The uncertainty about whether we would see Torsten again was unbearable."
After two months of blank refusal, Sigrid was unexpectedly granted a visa on condition that she stay in the west for a few hours only and that Hartmut remain in the east as surety in case she decided not to come back. She arrived to find that Torsten had taken a turn for the worse: the visit had been arranged so she could attend his emergency christening. "I hardly had my feelings under control as thoughts swirled through my head," says Sigrid. She contemplated abandoning everything her life, her husband and her elderly mother to remain with Torsten. But she couldn't bring herself to do it. "Even though my farewell to Torsten was painful, I managed to find sufficient strength to return to the east. If I had known what was to come, I would have stayed."
Sigrid returned to her job as a dental technician and to the process of applying for visas. Occasionally she would get one, but it was, she says, "trench warfare" with GDR bureaucracy. "Negotiating the border controls cost enormous amounts of energy. For days afterwards I would be exhausted and trapped in wild mood swings."
As Torsten approached his first birthday, the authorities cracked down. Sigrid was told that further attempts to get a visa would fail. She and Hartmut, who had seen his son only once during this time, decided their only option was to escape across the Wall. "I am not your classic resistance fighter," says Sigrid. "But I just couldn't come to terms with the system any more."
On one visit to the west, Sigrid had met someone who provided false passports for East Germans. So she, Hartmut and her mother made plans to catch a train north, escape via Scandinavia and fly back into west Berlin. They gave their valuables to relatives and sold their furniture, but just as they got to the station they received a message warning them not to board the train. The East German authorities had got wind of the escape route and closed it down. The three went home and burned their passports. "I was in despair," says Sigrid.
Sigrid had also met three students planning to flee the east and put them up in her flat for a couple of days. She was careful never to ask what their plans were. "The Stasi were almost certain to have bugged the house," she says, "and black limousines were often parked in front." After the students left, Sigrid discovered that they had walked into a Stasi trap.
Two weeks later, Sigrid was seized in the street on her way to work. "My husband was also arrested," she says. "I was brought to Normannenstrasse, the Stasi headquarters, and questioned for 22 hours. That is psychological torture. They asked me constantly about the three students."
Sigrid was taken to Hohenschnhausen prison and became prisoner number 93-2. She was there for six months. "Life was hell," she says. "I was never charged with anything and I didn't have a single meeting with a solicitor. All contact with the outside world was cut." Eventually put on trial in August 1963, Sigrid and Hartmut were charged with failing to reveal the students' escape plans and sentenced to four and a half years in prison.
Meanwhile, Torsten remained in the Westend hospital in west Berlin. He still had to be fed through a tube. "Doctors and nurses fussed over him, in particular Sister Liselotte, who became a mother figure to him," says Sigrid. "They sang to him, taught him to talk and walk, and tried as much as possible to act as parents."
The only news Sigrid received of Torsten was one letter from a nurse two months after her arrest and another from a doctor when he was nearly three. "I was always thinking of Torsten," says Sigrid. "What he looked like, if he could talk. I can't put that kind of longing into words."
Almost two years into her sentence, Sigrid was suddenly released. It turned out she and her husband had been ransomed by the West German Government. They were among thousands of political prisoners whose freedom was bought by the west in an arrangement which provided much needed hard currency to the East German coffers.But they still weren't allowed to go to the west.
It was another 11 months, when he was four and a half, before Torsten was well enough to go home. "Torsten had to say farewell to Sister Liselotte a painful experience for both after such a long time," says Sigrid. At the border he was transferred to an east Berlin ambulance and he and his parents restarted their lives together.
"Torsten was home at last, but it was not easy," says Sigrid. "Hartmut and I were both strangers. He didn't know what 'mother' meant. I was just an old woman in his eyes." It was only when Sigrid gave birth to a daughter, Ute, that Torsten's mistrust began to disappear. By the time she gave birth to another daughter, Frauke, in 1966, Torsten was flourishing. Today, Sigrid lives alone in a two-bedroom flat in south-east Berlin. She and Hartmut have split up but he lives two doors away. Torsten, 48, lives alone, also minutes away. Although trained as a sound engineer, he has never been able to hold down a full-time job due to his health problems.
The fall of the Wall in 1989 was a moment Sigrid cherished. "It will always be an utter highlight of my life. I was exhilarated. Finally, freedom came to me." She has striven to come to terms with what happened. "I became obsessed with listening to stories from other victims of east German injustice. I needed what some might call closure." When a law was passed that allowed people to read the Stasi files, Sigrid and Torsten were among the first to apply. She was horrified to discover that the Stasi had tried to recruit Torsten to spy on his own family.
In 1992, Sigrid's sentence was overturned and two years later she found the closure she needed. After retiring, she applied to work as a guide at the prison where she was held and now shows visitors the dank, bare cell she was locked up in and the rooms where she was relentlessly interrogated.
Her experiences have had a lasting impact on her relationship with her son. She has never found it easy to be separated from him; to this day, she does his shopping and cleaning, and the two are in touch constantly. "Torsten has been my Sorgenkind, the child I've worried about my whole life."
Is she still angry about what happened? "Raging," she says.
The Wall Through My Heart: Berlin: A Baby Between Two Worlds by Sigrid Paul is published by Zba Buch (zba-buch.de).
I am not sure what he would make of it: disbelief, amusement, or irritation that I should single him out. But my hero is Ernest Shephard, who spent much of his time on the Western Front as a company sergeant major.
He was born in Lyme Regis in 1892, the son of a photographer who was to lose two of his three boys in the war. He enlisted in the part-time Special Reserve in 1909, and transferred to the regular 1st Battalion, the Dorset Regiment, later that year, becoming a lance-corporal in 1910, a corporal in 1913 and a sergeant in 1914. The fact that he was at home on recruiting duties probably saved his life, for 1st Dorsets suffered cruelly: in October the battalion lost 399 men, 148 killed, in a single action.
Sergeant Shephard joined 1st Dorsets in January 1915, and began to keep a diary. There is horror, such as his first experience of gas: "Men were caught by fumes and in dreadful agony, coughing and vomiting, rolling on the ground . . ." There is a serious interest in food: "We made a grand stew in a washing bucket . . ." And there is an abundance of that comradeship that made war tolerable. When Company Sergeant Major Shapton was killed, Shephard wrote: "In Sam I have lost my dearest chum. We were always together whenever possible. He was an Army Reserve man when war broke out, and came from Canada to rejoin. I shall never forget the afternoon C Company was cut up . . . When I got to his trench I found him crying. He had been working like a demon, digging his men out and attending to the wounded . . ."
Commissioned in November 1916, Shephard died in January 1917, commanding a company of 5th Dorsets. His last recorded act was characteristically professional. When he knew his position was hopeless, he warned the supporting company to fall back, so as not to be overwhelmed too. Ernest Shephard is buried on the Somme, in the AIF Burial Ground at Grass Lane, Flers, and I go to see him as often as I can.
In this 'found poem' for Remembrance Day, Andrew Motion stitches together the words of several generations of shellshocked soldiers from the first world war to the present
Doctors, historians and other experts have documented the effects of shellshock thanks to them, we know that the term covers a multitude of ailments, and is the result of far more than just shells going off. But, as Ben Shephard wrote in his history of medical psychiatry, the people who have suffered from it have often been too ill to speak. They have been left out of the record. I wanted to hear from them. This is a "found" poem, a stitching together of the voices of shellshocked people. Their words have been taken from a variety of sources, from the first world war to the present, and are presented in the poem in roughly chronological order. There's a fragment of Siegfried Sassoon in there, but most are from unknown soldiers. Together, they give a sense of moving through time to establish what is horribly recurrent about this affliction. It is a poem by them, orchestrated by me.
An Equal Voice
"We hear more from doctors than patients. However hard he tries, the historian cannot even the account, cannot give the patients an equal voice, because most of them chose not to recount their experiences."
from A War of Nerves, by Ben Shephard
War from behind the lines is a dizzy jumble.
Revolving chairs, stuffy offices, dry as dust
reports, blueprints one day and the next
with the help of a broken-down motor car
and a few gallons of petrol marching men
with sweat-stained faces and shining eyes,
horses straining and plunging at the guns,
little clay-pits opening beneath each step,
and piles of bloody clothes and leggings
outside the canvas door of a field hospital.
At the end of the week there is no telling
whether you spent Tuesday going over
the specifications for a possible laundry
or skirting the edges of hell in an automobile.
*
There were some cases of nervous collapse
as the whistle blew on the first day of battle.
In general, however, it is perfectly astonishing
and terrifying how bravely the men fight.
From my position on rising ground I watched
one entire brigade advancing in line after line,
dressed as smartly as if they were on parade,
and not a single man shirked going through
the barrage, or facing the rapid machine-gun
and rifle-fire that finally wiped them all out.
I saw with my own eyes the lines advancing
in such admirable order quickly melt away.
Yet not a man wavered, or broke the ranks,
or made any attempt to turn back again.
*
A soft siffle, high in the air like a distant lark,
or the note of a penny whistle, faint and falling.
But then, with a spiral, pulsing flutter, it grew
to a hissing whirr, landing with ferocious blasts,
with tremendous thumps and then their echoes,
followed by the whine of fragments which cut
into the trees, driving white scars in their trunks
and filling the air with torn shreds of foliage.
The detonation, the flash, the heat of explosion.
And all the while fear, crawling into my heart.
It literally crawled into me. I had set my teeth
steadying myself, but with no success. I clutched
the earth, pressing against it. There was no one
to help me then. O how one loves mother earth.
*
One or two friends stood like granite rocks
round which the seas raged, but very many
other men broke in pieces. Everyone called it
shell-shock, meaning concussion, but shell-
shock is rare. What 90% get is justifiable funk
due to the collapse of the helm of our self-control.
You understand what you see but you cannot think.
Your head is in agony and you want relief for that.
The more you struggle, the more madness creeps
over you. The brain cannot think of anything at all.
I don't ask you what you feel like but I tell you,
because I have been like you. I have been ill as you
and got better. I will teach you, you will get better.
Try and keep on trying what I tell you and you will.
*
The place was full of men whose slumbers were morbid,
titubating shell-shockers with their bizarre paralyses
and stares, their stammers and tremors, their nightmares
and hallucinations, their unstoppable fits and shakings.
Each was back in his doomed shelter, when the panic
and stampede was re-enacted among long-dead faces,
or still caught in the open and under fire. This officer
was quietly feasting with imaginary knives and forks;
that group roamed around clutching Teddy Bears;
one man stripped to his underclothes and proclaimed
himself to be Mahatma Gandhi; another sat cramped
in a corner clutching a champagne cork; one chanted,
with his hands over an imaginary basket of eggs, Lord
have mercy on us, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.
*
I could feel the bullets hit my body. I could feel
myself being hit by gun fire and this is what made me
sit up and scream. What I saw round me were others
walking with the bent and contorted spines of old age,
or moving without their lifting their legs, by vibrating limbs
on the ground. All equally unfortunate, filled with sadness.
Dead friends gazed at them. Rats emerged from the cavities
of bodies. Then came trembling and losing control of legs:
you never dreamt of such gaits. One fellow cannot hold
his head still or even stand except with incessant jerking.
Instantly the man across the aisle follows suit. In this way
the infection spreads in widening circles until the whole
ward is jerking and twitching, all in their hospital blues,
their limbs shaking and flapping like the tails of dogs.
*
Naturally it can save a good deal of time if men,
before battle, have pictures from the Hate Room hung
in their minds of things the enemy has already done,
waiting to be remembered. Starving people for instance
and sick people, and dead people in ones and in heaps.
If that proves ineffective, then treatment is post facto.
Compulsory mourning is no longer recommended
whereby the hospital confines a man for three days
alone in a darkened room and orders him to grieve
for dead comrades. But other cures must be attempted,
and in some cases men wish to return to do their duty.
See, your eyes are already heavier. Heavier and heavier.
You are going into a deep, deep sleep. A deep, far sleep.
You are far asleep. You are fast sleep. You have no fear.
*
I am quiet and healthy but cannot bear being away
from England. I have been away too long and seen
too many things. My best friend was killed beside me.
I have a wife and two children and I have done enough.
I thought my nerves were better but they are worse.
The first fight, the fight with my own self, has ended.
I may be ready to fight again but I am not willing.
I am in urgent need of outdoor work and would be glad
to accept a position as a gardener at a nominal salary.
My best friend walked back into my room this morning,
shimmering white and transparent. I saw him clearly.
He stood at the foot of my bed and looked right at me.
I asked him, What do you want? What do you want?
Eventually I woke up and of course I was by myself.
</td></tr></table>Students at the University of Sussex, England have voted to boycott Israeli goods. The decision follows the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, which calls upon the Israeli state to respect international law and end the occupation of Palestine. In a campus-wide referendum, 56 percent of students voted in favor of the boycott.
</td></tr></table>UNITED NATIONS (IPS) - A 575-page blistering report by Justice Richard Goldstone detailing war crimes in Gaza last winter is refusing to die despite an aggressive Israeli smear campaign to kill it. The report, which was favorably voted by the 47-member Human Rights Council in Geneva last month, received overwhelming support Thursday in the 192-member General Assembly. The vote was 114 in favor and 18 against, with 44 abstentions.
</td></tr></table>In order to find sustainable alternatives to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict a new group calling itself the Justice Makers has been formed across the law departments in Palestinian universities. Two of the founders, Mohammed Eliwa and Yousef al-Nouri, are both fourth-year law students from al-Azhar University in Gaza. "The Justice Makers is about finding new ways within the international justice system to forward our case," al-Nouri explained. Biana Zammit reports from the occupied Gaza Strip.
</td></tr></table>RAMALLAH, occupied West Bank (IPS) - Palestinian women continue to suffer abuse and denial of basic human rights at the hands of Israeli settlers and soldiers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This is in flagrant violation of Israel's obligations as a signatory to the UN Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
</td></tr></table>Mohammed Ahmed Issa Yassen, 20, lives in the occupied West Bank village of Bilin, where he works in his family's car garage business as a mechanic. He is also a student at the al-Quds Open University, but since he has joined the Israeli intelligence's "wanted" list from the village, studying has been difficult. The Electronic Intifada contributor Jody McIntyre interviewed Mohammed about living under the constant threat of arrest.
IPS Inter Press Service
Twitter / TheGlobalReport
WASHINGTON - Representative Anthony D. Weiner, Democrat of New York, a fierce champion in Congress of a single-payer health system that would be fully run by the government, said Friday that he had agreed not to insist on a vote on that issue, in an effort to help Democratic leaders pass their plan.
Previously, Mr. Weiner had obtained a commitment from Speaker Nancy Pelosi to allow a vote on a proposal to create a single-payer system like the one used by Canada and many countries in Europe, including England, France and Spain.
UN representatives have been working to create a draft political agreement to be presented at next month's climate change talks in Copenhagen.
But the lack of a legally binding deal at the five-day summit in Barcelona has left many at the talks disappointed.
With the clock ticking, this was meant to be the final step towards a global agreement.
This gathering in Barcelona was to produce the next blueprint for the fight against climate change - the document all leaders would sign next month in Copenhagen. Only - it hasn't - and they won't.
Al Gore has sought to inject fresh momentum into the Copenhagen build-up, saying he is certain Barack Obama will attend and predicting a rise in civil disobedience against fossil-fuel polluters unless drastic action is taken over global warming.
New research shows that ornamental plants can drastically reduce levels of stress and ill health and boost performance levels at work because they soak up harmful indoor air pollution.
Researchers have now identified five "super ornamental plants" which every workplace should have to clean up indoor air.
They include English ivy, waxy leaved plants and ferns.
According to a World Health Organisation report in 2002, harmful indoor pollutants represent a serious health problem that is responsible for more than 1.6 million deaths each year.
It seems that Hamid Karzai just can't be trusted on his own.
When he breasted the microphone at the presidential palace on October 20, to make an oblique admission that he attempted to steal the election and would go along with the second poll which he had resisted for weeks, he was flanked by a high-powered international posse - lest he depart from the agreed script.
On one side was the US senator John Kerry; on the other, the United Nations special envoy Kai Eide; and riding shotgun were the British and French ambassadors.
RSS
