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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark and this is The World.  One of the buzzwords from President Obama’s campaign was “change”.  And there’s some hope that change could be on the horizon in the Middle East.  The President’s special Mid-East envoy, George Mitchell, is on his way to Syria.  It will be his second visit in as many months.  For years, Syria has been an implacable enemy of Israel, an ally of Iran, and a sponsor of militant groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon.  The question is whether Mitchell is able to coax a change out of Damascus.  Joshua Landis is a leading blogger on Syria, and is associate professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oklahoma.  Joshua Landis, I’d like your thoughts on why Mitchell is going back to Damascus?

JOSHUA LANDIS:  Well, Obama’s strategic plan for the Middle East and his attempts to get the Middle East peace process moving are in danger of stalling.  It’s a little bit like his health plan, in a sense.  And so I think this is an attempt to get the ball rolling.

CLARK:  So how do you move forward there?  I’m wondering if you think that Syria really does want to cooperate with the United States, if it can just get past the fears?

LANDIS:  I think Syria does.  You know, I just got off the phone with some people at the Syrian embassy, and they’re very concerned.  They say, “We’ve been let down by America a number of times in the past.  We want very much to move forward.  It’s in our interest.  We need good relations with America.  We want Golan Heights back, and we want peace with Israel.  But we don’t want to be roles.”  And they put it almost entirely in those words.  We want to make sure that this is going to be comprehensive, and developing that trust is difficult.  It’s important that Mitchell go continue this dialogue.

CLARK:  Do you think that something might come out of this, or these are just the small steps that must be made in democracy and mean nothing out of this particular trip that is building on a greater program?

LANDIS:  Well, I think that things can come out of this, that right now the first step is the Iraq intelligence share.  America wants to establish a regime where Syria will be arresting people on the Syria side of the border, that Americans will be giving intelligence to Syrian people, and the Syrians will go off and arrest them.  And Syrians will be happy to do this, but it also wants to be called an Ambassador and not to be called a territory state and so forth, and it’s moving ahead and working on all these things.  So that’s the first step.  Then of course there has to be movement on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Golan Heights.  And there we have a real problem, because Prime Minister Netanyahu says Israel is not going to give back the Golan Heights.  Syria says, “We need the Golan Heights.”  And so much of the problems between America and Syria hinge on this issue, because Syria – as you said in your opening – supports radical groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, that America doesn’t like Israel as much.  But Syria supports them because they put pressure on Israel that Syria needs in order to get back the Golan.  And Syria’s not going to stop supporting those groups unless it has peace with Israel and gets back its land.  So American can go around this issue 100 different ways and patch up relations with Syria, but it will never have decent relations with Syria so long as Golan Heights is occupied by Israel.  And that’s the end goal that we really need to get to, and that Mitchell needs to get to.  And that’s going to be a very difficult goal.

CLARK:  Joshua Lands is director of Middle East studies at the University of Oklahoma.  Thank you.

LANDIS:  My pleasure.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

KATY CLARK: As difficult as the Golan Heights question is, it may be a breeze next to the issue of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.  Israel’s expansion of these settlements over the years has lost it many friends.  And the Obama administration has called for a complete freeze on settlement growth.  But expansion under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has continued, as have Israeli attempts to justify the settlements.   The World’s Matthew Bell reports on how Israel’s settlement rhetoric has evolved over the years.

MATTHEW BELL:  For Netanyahu, the political stakes are high when it comes to Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.  His right-wing coalition supports the settlement movement.  Some members of his cabinet actually live in West Bank settlements.  That includes Yuli Edelsteen, Minister for Information and Diaspora Affairs.  In a recent interview with this program, Edelsteen referred to lands in the West Bank by their Biblical names, Judea and Samaria.  Here he is talking about why he believes Washington’s demand for a settlement freeze is wrong.

EDELSTEEN:  So right now, to say that part of the Judea and Samaria should become, pardon me for saying that this way, but Judenfrei – Jew-free, absolutely – I’m not sure that this is the approach that behooves any country.

BELL:  The expression “Judenfrei” was used by the Nazis during the Holocaust to describe areas ethnically cleansed of Jews.  Other Israeli officials have been using similar provocative language in recent weeks.  It’s not clear yet how that message is playing here in the US.

ELLIOT ABRAMS:  I think it has the chance of persuading some people in the United States that, on this very controversial issue, the administration’s gone too far.

BELL:  Elliot Abrams was a key advisor on Middle East policy to George W. Bush.

ABRAMS:  When you say, “Gee, the Israelis shouldn’t be allowed to build in occupied territory, a lot of Americans are likely to say, ‘Yeah, that sounds right.”  But when you say, “Wait a minute.  Are you saying there are neighborhoods where Jews shouldn’t be allowed to live?  Why would that be?” That of course sounds like a lot more attractive argument.  So I think from a public relations point of view, it’s a smart way, and I would argue a fair way, of casting the argument.

BELL:  Abrams says it was the Obama administration that started this public fight with Israel over the settlements.  The Israelis are simply responding by framing the issue for maximum effect and trying to rally their base of support.  But the settlement enterprise has always been a tough sell, even among American supporters of Israel.  Aaron David Miller is a former State Department advisor on Middle East affairs, who’s now with Wilson Center in Washington.

MILLER:  The whole idea particularly when it’s financed, or appears to be financed with American dollars, kind of doesn’t play well here.  There’s a certain illegitimacy of that enterprise which most Americans simply will not identify with.

BELL:  This is the dilemma for the Israelis.  The more secure the country is, the more illegitimate its West Bank settlements appear to be.  In the early years after the 1967 war, Israeli leaders said they needed a presence there for security reasons.  Israel seemed very much under threat from its Arab neighbors.  Now, nearly 300,000 Israeli civilians in West Bank settlements.  And Israel’s military is the region’s strongest.  As the security argument has faded away, the settlements have been described in religious terms.  Proponents cite Biblical language about the Jewish people’s God-given right to the Holy Land.  These arguments too have become less persuasive to mainstream Americans.  They’re less persuasive to many American Jews as well.  But Philip Wilcox, of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, says American Jews are torn over this issue.

WILCOX:  There is a deep ambivalence in the American Jewish community who want smooth and warm relations between the United States and the state of Israel.  And while intellectually and conceptually they understand that settlements are wrong and they’re a mistake, they are very wary of a confrontation between the United States and Israel.

BELL:  That ambivalence comes from an understanding that the rhetorical flourishes surrounding the issue of settlements is about more than just settlements.  In a way it’s code for a whole host of larger issues.  The final status of Jerusalem, the creation of a Palestinian state, demarcation of its borders, and the question of whether Jews will be allowed to live there.  For The World, I’m Matthew Bell.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

KATY CLARK: Israel features in a big and grisly story out of New Jersey right now.  It’s part of that corruption scandal that resulted in the arrests of several rabbis and politicians yesterday.  The part we’re going to focus on involves the illegal trade of human organs.  Federal investigators arrested a Brooklyn man who allegedly bought and sold human kidneys for transplant.  Some of the live donors were citizens of Israel.  Arthur Caplan is co-chair of the UN task force on human trafficking.  He’s in Philadelphia.  Professor Caplan, human trafficking is a modern horror story and at least the stuff of urban horror stories, but we normally associate it with poor countries in Eastern Europe. This story involves the United States and Israel.  Should we be surprised?

ARTHUR CAPLAN:  I’m a little surprised.  I thought that American transplant centers are pretty big risk and pretty tough in trying to screen people who show up here from long distances and say that they want to altruistically donate a kidney, when in fact they’re simply there because they’re trying to sell a kidney.  And I do think actually most American centers do try hard, but it clearly has come here.  It has touched other wealthy countries – Hong Kong, some of the wealthy hospitals in China, poor people from around the world have been shipped – trafficked if you will – to wealthy countries where wealthy people get their kidneys.  So it is a kind of transfer, if you will, from the very poor to the very rich.

CLARK:  What do you know about illegal organ trafficking in Israel?  Does Israel have any particular problem with this?

CAPLAN:  Not particularly in Israel.  Israel has had, if you will, some people who have come there for transplants when poor people from other countries have been trafficked there to get organs.  We know that that’s happened sometimes.  I haven’t heard of a situation where poor Israelis have gone out of the country to try and sell a kidney.  That’s a first to me, and I track this pretty closely. So I’m not sure Israel would be anymore at the center of the organ trafficking world than India or Egypt or even Europe, but it’s a little surprising to hear that recruitment went on there and people were brought here.

CLARK:  I’ve seen on researcher describe kidneys as the new blood diamonds, meaning there’s an enormous amount of money in illegal trade.  Is that because there simply aren’t enough legal kidneys for transplant available?

CAPLAN:  Well, shortage definitely does drive this underground market.  It’s also the case that the middlemen have a field day making a ton of money. The desperately poor really do get exploited.  Part of my opposition to this – I’m so ethically repulsed by people trading an organ this way is that it’s the poorest of the poor who wind up doing the sales.  And they’re so badly off that all they can think of to do is sell a child, sell a kidney, or they sell themselves into prostitution.  There are all forms of trafficking people, and I think what we have to be careful about is not to say, “Look.  People can choose.  They make a decision.  They get paid.”  That’s not the real world works.

CLARK:  What do you do to stop this, though?  Not just in the US, but in all these other countries that are currently involved?

CAPLAN:  You know, there is basically three things that we have to do.  One, we have to make this a priority both for police both in each individual country and for Interpol.  Secondly, we have to discourage people from transplant tourism.  You hear somebody say, ‘Well, I’m going to go to Hong Kong, or I’m going to go to Saudi Arabia, and I’m going to get this procedure done.”  What they’re really telling you is they’re going to buy a kidney from some desperately poor person.  That isn’t something we should be encouraging, even though these are people who don’t want to wait for organs – and here they might not get one – that going to this system is a way out.  Last, every transplant center should be held accountable and responsible for knowing where the organ came from they’re going to transplant.  They do that, they’re going to be very vigorous in making sure they know the person came because they really wanted to help someone, or they came because they’re desperately poor and they’re trying to sell their way out of poverty.

CLARK:  Arthur Caplan directs the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.  Thank you so much for speaking to us.

CAPLAN:  My pleasure.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark.  This is The World.  For decades, China has limited population growth by limiting the number of children couples could have.  It’s referred to as the one-child policy – though there were many exceptions to this rule.  Now, officials in Shanghai say they’re ready to encourage couples to have two children.  YiYi Lu is a Research Fellow for the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham.  Ms. Lu, this seems like a major change.  Is it, really?

YIYI LU:  Actually, it is not a major change because as you already said this policy – it has many exceptions for people who have more than one child.  From the very beginning, it was decided that if a couple, the husband and wife, they’re both the only child themselves, then they can have two children.  So it has always been allowed.  In that sense, it’s not new.  What is new is that even in the past, if the couple can have two children, the government encouraged you to have one.  Now, they’re changing that.  They’re saying, “Well actually we encourage you to have two.”

CLARK:  And I mean, Shanghai officials, as I understand it, they’re sort of going around and the couples who qualify for this, they’re slipping pamphlets under their doors and things like that, so they’re actually trying to publicize these exceptions more perhaps than they ever have before.  Is that the case?

LU:  Yes.  I think this actually reflects a broader debate going on in China for a few years, which is now you can feel the pressure of the aging of the population.  More and more people are retired, and less people are entering the workforce.  So scholars have been saying that we need to stop the one child policy at some point in order to ease the pressure.  So the debate has been going on, and the Shanghai practice kind of reflects at the local level, at least in Shanghai, they feel time has already come actively, and cultural people have too.  But at the national level, although there has been debate, so far no decision has been taken that we need to officially expand or reverse the policy.

CLARK:  And I guess, too, it should be noted that you talked about how if both of the parents are only children, they can have two children, and that’s the way it’s been all along.  And we’re entering a phase now where most people of child-bearing age are only children themselves.  So therefore they would be allowed to have 2 children anyway.

LU:  Yes, exactly.  Although, another interesting trend is that in cities, especially big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, many young people don’t want to have any children.  So I think that’s also a factor why the government’s actually encouraging them to have children.

CLARK:  I understand that the Chinese really need this change, since more than 8 percent of Chinese people are over 65, and only one-third have a pension.  It seems like there’s something of a crisis, a demographic crisis going on with the aging population in China?

LU:  Yes.  This issue has been going on for years, but I think the policymakers also weigh this with other considerations.  There is still the problem of overpopulation because the population of China are not evenly distributed.  They tend to populate in certain areas.  So I think they’re weighing the pros and cons, and the decision so far has been the policies do need to be in place for some more years.

CLARK:  Has there been any official statement from the Chinese government as a whole?  I mean, ‘were talking about Shanghai here.  What about for the rest of China?  It seems as if what happens in Shanghai could easily start to happen across rest of the country.  Could China be facing a big baby boom?

LU:  I think there won’t be any reaction either way, whether to praise it or to criticize it, because as we’ve established, it’s actually not in any way changing the current policy, but it hasn’t amount to national level official change of policy yet.

CLARK:  Yiyi Lu is with the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham in England.  Thank you very much.

LU:  Thanks.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

KATY CLARK: Have you heard the one about the man who earned $10 million dollars last year telling ethnic jokes?  That would be Russell Peters.  According to Forbes magazine, he’s one of the highest-earning comedians in the world.  The Indian-born Canadian has made his way to the top by tearing into his own and other cultures.  Reporter Anita Elash went to a Russell Peters performance in Toronto.

ANITA ELASH:  Thousands of people fill a city block in downtown Toronto to hear Peters’ special brand of ethnic comedy.

PETERS:  Last weekend was a very significant holiday for Indian people – it was July 11.  And it’s a very big holiday for my people because that’s 7-Eleven.

ELASH:  Peters always begins his routine with jokes about Indians.  But by the time he’s finished, pretty much no race or ethnic group is left standing.

PETERS:  Black people – I see there are black people everywhere, okay.  Let’s keep the gunshots to a minimum.

ELASH:  Peters is not what you’d call politically correct.  And that’s a big part of the appeal for this audience.  Most of them are brown-skinned, too.

WOMAN:  I love him.  You feel so much at home when he tells those jokes because we crack those jokes all the time back home.

MAN:  At the beginning he introduced us about jokes about his culture, and then he make jokes about everybody at the same level, and we like that.  We like to know about things that we are wrong on it.

ELASH:  Ethnic humor is nothing new on the comedy club circuit.  Here’s comedian Pat Paulson in black-face, on the Smothers Brothers show back in 1974.

PAULSON:  I really think it’s terrible what’s happening in this country.  Jokes they make about minorities.  I’d like to give you some examples of this bigoted humor.  You know what caused the California earthquake.  They buried a Polak and the earth rejected him.

ELASH:  More recently, comics like Dave Chappelle and Carlos Mencia made millions poking fun at stereotypes of blacks and Latinos.  Peters told jokes about Indians and other immigrants for 15 years before he got his first taste of fame.  Five years ago, one of his performances went viral on YouTube.  Since then, he’s become the leader of what some call the third path in comedy.  Not white or black, but brown.  And he’s opened the way for a whole new stream of ethnic comic.  Mark Breslin is the founder of the comedy club chain Yuk Yuk’s.

BRESLIN:  What you have to remember is that Russell has achieved this level of fame without first becoming a movie star or a TV star, and that makes his level of achievement even more amazing.  What it says to me is the incredible level of need for a voice of a people.  And that’s what Russell has become.  He’s become the voice of a people who have been denied, an active voice in global culture until now.

ELASH:  Peters says he didn’t set out to become the comedic voice of brown people. He grew up in an immigrant neighborhood just outside Toronto.  So he was just telling the jokes that came most naturally.

PETERS:  When I started doing this 20 years ago, I was the first Indian guy.  People weren’t ready yet.  Immigrants were still new in ’89, and immigrants are now more settled in and they’re more comfortable with their position.  And then they see someone who looks like not the norm, and they want to hear what this guy has to say.

ELASH:  This audience can’t seem to get enough of it.

PETERS:  I always think we should have an Indian ice hockey team.  That’s what I think we need.  They would be like the Toronto Maple Sikhs and they’d be incredible, and they wouldn’t wear helmets.  Just blue and white turbans.

ELASH:  Peters says he’s looking forward to a new kind of comedian, the brown guy who people will laugh at even if he doesn’t tell a single ethnic joke.  For The World, I’m Anita Elash in Toronto.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Karadzic as "Dragan Dabic" (left) and in court

New York Times gallery

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH Boston.  The war crimes trial of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic hasn’t started yet, but Karadzic is already challenging some of the evidence against him.  Prosecutors have charged Karadzic with masterminding the 1995 massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.  Karadzic wants access to DNA evidence from mass graves, because, he claims, the death toll has been exaggerated.  The former Bosnian Serb leader was in hiding for years before his arrest last year in Belgrade.  Karadzic had been living a relatively public life there, practicing alternative medicine under the name Dragan Dabic.  Jack Hitt’s story about Karadzic’s new-age adventure will appear in this Sunday’s New York Times magazine.  Jack Hitt, it’s a strange story indeed.  I mean, tell us exactly how did the most hunted war criminal on the planet manage to spend 3 years becoming, as you explain in your piece, something of a minor celebrity in Belgrade, without anyone realizing who he was?

JACK HITT:  Well, you know, I think a lot of people expected him to hide out in the sort of heroic way that you expect war criminals to.

CLARK:  In the mountains?

HITT:  Go into the jungle and you know, eat squirrel and live with his men.  But Radovan Karadzic was a psychiatrist before he was a politician.  He was a member of the traditional medicine community, and I think he understood the sort of – the psychological politics of how to hide at an age when everything is watched and seen. So rather than hide out as a traditional doctor, he sort of moved one discipline over, to alternative medicine where, let’s just say that because of some of the dodgy practices, a lot of odd behavior is excused.

CLARK:  What kind of odd behavior are you talking about?  Give us an example of some of his stuff that you experienced or encountered.

HITT:  Well, one of the people that he fell in with was Savo Bojovic, who is a fairly well known sexologist, who has invented a number of different machines. He had a solution for men who womanized a lot and worried about getting women pregnant, so he had invented a small metal cup he would cradle their testicles in and then pass a small amount of electricity through that, and his machine would put all the sperm to sleep for awhile, and it would allow a man to go out and heroically exercise his – his manhood.  Radovan Karadzic and the persona of Dragan Dabic had settled on just the fact that his hands could radiate this bioenergy warmth, and he could detect illness and correct it with his hands.  I had many people describe for me how he had healed certain people.  The one thing about that world, though, is that they’re all aware of the fact that many people don’t believe that their methods work.  And so when you hang out with these people, they spend a lot of time talking to you about their method, trying to convince you of its efficacy.  They don’t really listen to what you have to say.  So if you are hiding out, it’s a great world if you want to just sort of sit quietly in a place and not have a lot of people bother you with questions.

CLARK:  But are these people who live in the real world?  I mean, I’m wondering if they knew what Radovan Karadzic looked like, and if they actually took a good look at Dragan Dabic, they would have seen some similarities and might have suspected something more?

HITT:  You know, I went over there thinking that they must have known, or that some of them did, because that was sort of the word on the street. I’m not convinced that they did.  I’m now convinced that they did not know.  If you look at the photographs of him as the alternative healer, he has grown this enormous mass of gray hair and he’s bundled it up on the top of his head in this big knot right at his forehead.  It’s very noticeable and odd, so you have to look at it.  You

don’t look at his eyes, for example.  He lost some weight, so it sort of pulled down his face a little bit and changed his eye shape.  He grew an enormous bushranger beard.  He looked different in every possible respect.  There was nothing about him that looked like Radovan Karadzic.

CLARK:  In fact, as you write, there was a woman who lived across the street from him in Belgrade and said “Good morning” to him every morning, I think, and she worked for Interpol.  When she logged on to her computer, there was a picture of “Wanted:  Radovan Karadzic” right up there, and she never even noticed.

HITT:  Her screensaver was a picture of Osama Bin Laden and Radovan Karadzic, and little did she know she was saying “Good morning” to him.

CLARK:  While reading your story, I found myself wondering about the idea of redemption and if Karadzic might have actually repented for his alleged war crimes?

HITT:  There’s been no repentance and there’s no – so far, he does not acknowledge he’s committed these crimes.  I will say that when I talked to all of the people who were duped by him, they don’t feel they’ve been duped at all.  I would say to them, “So, you know, this man, his name is not really Dragan Dabic.  He was not really a healer.  He was Radovan Karadzic.”   And they would say, “I don’t know Radovan Karadzic.  I know Dragan Dabic, and he’s a good man.”   And many of them said, “I believe that Dragan Dabic is the real person and that Radovan Karadzic is the fake, invented persona.”

CLARK:  Jack Hitt is a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine.  His story about Radovan Karadzic appears this Sunday.  Thanks for speaking with us.

HITT:  Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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KATY CLARK: In many parts of Africa, when people get sick, there’s a good chance that they won’t go to the doctor for a visit or the pharmacist for a prescription.  They’ll go to a traditional healer for some herbs or some prayers or a ceremony or two.  They do it for lots of reasons:  limited access to medical care, the prohibitive costs of Western medicines or because their spiritual beliefs tell them to.  Jori Lewis reports from the West African nation Senegal where traditional medicine is big business.

JORI LEWIS:  Rokhaya Pouye had been suffering from years.  She couldn’t eat.  She couldn’t walk.  She couldn’t sleep.  When her family took her to the hospital, the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with her.  So her family decided if it wasn’t the body, it had to be the spirit – or spirits, to be precise.  Madame Pouye says she turned to traditional medicine.  The spirits, she says, asked her to kill three oxen in a ten-day ceremony to protect herself from the sorcerers.  She says she was healed by an ndeup ceremony.  It’s a ritual that involves prayer, animal sacrifice and dance.  And now she helps out at local ndeup ceremonies, like this one in a suburb of Dakar.   The women of this extended family whirl, jump and fling themselves around a courtyard.  They move to the drums until they feel the spirits taking over their bodies.  One woman falls to the ground, tears running down her face.  Another picks up a drummer and carries him around.  He doesn’t miss a beat.  It’s beautiful to watch.  But is this medicine?  Mamadou Ngom oversees the traditional medicine sector for the World Health Organization in Dakar.  His answer is an emphatic yes.

NGOM:  Yes, that’s traditional medicine.  The problem that we have as scientists is that we are grounded in reason and scientific criteria.  We say, “What are they doing?”  But it’s something that they have done many times over many years, and they know they will get the same results.

LEWIS:  Ngom says that in Africa, about 80 percent of people use or have used traditional medicine.  That’s a big umbrella term that encompasses everything from an ndeup ceremony to incantations to healing with herbs and powders.  Many like Madame Pouye turn to traditional medicine after going to a medical doctor.  But others go because it’s cheaper, more convenient or it’s all they know.  Sometimes they regret it.  Across the border in the Gambian capital of Banjul, I met the Saho family.  They were gathered on the hospital bed of 1-year-old Ibrahima.  When Ibramhima got sick with a bad fever, his father Ousmane took him to a marabout, a spiritual leader and healer.  And then he went to another and another.

OUSMANE:  Some were telling me his private parts got problems, that’s why he is sick.  Some were telling me he lacks water, you know, he don’t have enough water.  You know, they were giving me conflicting information about my child’s sickness.  But later on when I come with my senses based on the advice of my wife, I have to come to the hospital.  Thank God, he’s recovering.

LEWIS:  Little Ibrahima had pneumonia.  At the hospital they gave him antibiotics and attached him to an IV.  When I met them, Ibrahima had been in the hospital for about 10 days, but was finally getting better.  Charles Katy is the cultural director for the International Association for the Promotion of Traditional Medicine, known as PROMETRA.  He says fakes and charlatans are a problem.

KATY:  We have many charlatans here.  They say marabout but when somebody says, “I’m a marabout.  I can do this and this.  Come and see me.  My house is there.  This is my number.  Call me and so on.”  It’s not because he’s able to treat but he wants money.

LEWIS:  In an attempt to address this problem, Prometra has established a clinic in the Senegalese town of Fatick, where the healers police each other; they have organized hundreds of them:  priests, fortune tellers, bonesetters, and herbal specialists.  Healers at the clinic meet once a month to discuss clinic business.  Diene Ndiaye is the current chairman.  Ndiaye harvests certain herbs and plants to help people with respiratory diseases, gastrointestinal problems and STD’s.  He says the wisest healers know their own limits, and that there is a role for both types of medicine.

NDIAYE:  The medical doctor and traditional healer, it’s like the right hand and the left hand.  If they join, they can more effectively help people.  Medical doctors are doing a very good job but sometimes they fail in treating diseases where traditional medicine works.  At other times, it’s the other way around.  I think we have to work together.

LEWIS:  The WHO says it wants to help African countries register and regulate traditional healers.  The scientists can identify plants and herbs and their uses.  What they can’t do is regulate the spiritual aspects at the heart of so many traditional practices.  But most people here would say even though those practices aren’t science, they’re still medicine.  For The World, I’m Jori Lewis, in Fatick, Senegal.

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KATY CLARK: Joaquim Crima was born in the West African country of Guinea Bissau 37 years ago.  Now, he lives in Central Russia and is running for office as a kind of district representative.  Crima’s the first black person to ever be a candidate in Russia.  Jessica Golloher reports.

JESSICA GOLLOHER:  Joaquim Crima is a naturalized Russian citizen.  He’s adopted a Russian name, calling himself Vasily Ivanovic.  And like any candidate for office, he knows how to talk the talk.  Here he is through a translator.

JOAQUIM CRIMA:  I became interested in politics because there were many electoral promises that were not fulfilled in the last election.  That’s why I’m interested to see what I can do to improve the conditions in my area.

GOLLOHER:  Local election officials say he faces an uphill battle.  They say most voters will only support him because they think his candidacy is a joke or because they want to protest against Russia’s dismal political system.  Russians are notoriously prejudiced; Africans living in Moscow and other cities routinely say they are insulted, harassed, and beaten.  Alexander Verkohvsky is head of the Sova Center for Information and Analysis in Moscow, a group dedicated to researching xenophobia and nationalism in Russia.  He gives Crima a lot of credit.

VERKOHVSKY:  It’s very seldom situation when a person of so far foreign a region tries to do that.

GOLLOHER:  And Verkohvsky expects some racist groups will attack his candidacy.  Crima says that if Russia is a democracy, then why shouldn’t he run?  Despite the odds, and what appear to be racially motivated threats against him, Crima says he’s not worried and has even turned some of the insults to his advantage.  He was quoted in a populist tabloid as saying he would “slave for the benefit of his constituents”.  Crima first came to Russia in the last days of the Soviet Union to study to become a teacher.  He currently earns a living selling fruit with his father-in-law.  For The World, I’m Jessica Golloher in Moscow.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.