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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.

LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. It’s been seven weeks since US troops withdrew from cities in Iraq. The idea was that the Iraqi government could restore a sense of normalcy to its urban areas. Well right now that idea seems like little more than wishful thinking. Today at least five bombs exploded near government buildings in an area that has been relatively safe. The biggest blast was near the Iraqi Foreign Ministry. Ninety-five people were killed. It was the deadliest attack in the Iraqi capital in more than a year. Washington Post reporter Ernesto Londono is in Baghdad now. How well coordinated were these attacks?

ERNESTO LONDONO: What is unique about these attacks is that in recent weeks we’ve seen several attacks targeting Shia areas and places like markets and places that are heavily transited. But by and large they were soft targets. They weren’t targets that were heavily guarded. What we saw today indicates that the insurgency remains able to carry out pretty high-profile attacks in key locations, in locations where there should have been very heavily guarded and it should have been a priority for the government to keep safe.

MULLINS: Now three of the mortars, we should say, landed in the green zone – this is the heavily fortified area in Baghdad that contains the US Embassy. Do the Iraqi security forces who are supposed to be protecting these sites, where they neglectful or is it possible they were unready or co-opted even by those who were doing the attacks?

LONDONO: There are many Iraqis who believe that the security forces remain infiltrated. I interviewed earlier today an official at the Finance Ministry who was gravely wounded in the attacks and what he had to say was look the capital was attacked in a very short period of time in several key areas. He said he was convinced that the government’s security forces remain infiltrated by some of the perpetrators of violence and that much work remains to be done to wean the security forces of some of those influences.

MULLINS: Well how about the ability of the Iraqi security forces to be able to stand on their own and provide enough protection when American’s are basically on the sidelines right now as part of the deal. Did any Americans respond to these latest attacks and what is their role?

LONDONO: Americans did in fact respond to the bombing sites. They sent explosive ordinance teams to do some forensic review to try to see what kind of explosives were used and how they got there. However Americans are pretty restrained since June 30^th in what they can do. Many Iraqis today were asking, you know, could this have been prevented if the Americans still had a robust presence in the city. And I expect that American commanders and Iraqi officials will be asking themselves that question which is an uncomfortable question in the lead up to the national election in January.

MULLINS: Right the national election is coming up in January. I wonder if people assume that there will be more violence and if they assume that because the United States has to basically ask for permission to respond to incidents like today’s if it seems that the US policy which has been trumpeted – this urban pullout that happened on June 30^th – if it seems like this policy is not working.

LONDONO: I think it will take some ways to see how American officials respond to this if at all. I mean one option would be for American officials to re-inject themselves more actively into Baghdad primarily and other urban areas. But by doing so they would undermine the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. I had a very brief conversation with one of the American soldiers who responded to the Finance Ministry bombing and our conversation I think was indicative of how many soldiers feel. I approached him and I asked him if it would be okay for me to take his photograph. He was surveying the scene and picking up some debris from the ground. And in sort of light-hearted way he said sure just make sure you photograph me doing nothing because that’s what we’re supposed to be doing here. So I think there’s frustration among US soldiers that after six years of being here and after a lot of hard work they’re seeing a continued violence and they no longer have the ability to respond aggressively to these threats.

MULLINS: One would think that that’s what the insurgents who are behind these attacks are counting on.

LONDONO: I think that’s a fair statement.

MULLINS: Alright thank you very much. Washington Post reporter Ernesto Londono who is now in Baghdad. Thank you again.

LONDONO: 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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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.

LISA MULLINS: Afghanistan has also had its share of violence in the run-up to tomorrow’s presidential election and the Taliban have vowed to attack polling stations on election day. Afghan officials are so concerned about the impact on voter turnout that they issued a statement today. It said news organizations should avoid, “broadcasting any incidents of violence between 6 am and 5 pm on election day. Meanwhile President Hamid Karzai is urging people to get out and vote as The World’s Jeb Sharp reports those who do are likely to vote largely along ethnic lines.

JEB SHARP: President Karzai himself accentuated the nature of Afghan voting patterns this week when he courted the 4 million strong Uzbek vote. He did that by pardoning the notorious Uzbek warlord, Abdul Rashid Dostum, and inviting him home from exile in Turkey. Dostum immediately went to work campaigning for Karzai. South Asia expert Lisa Curtis at the Heritage Foundation says it showed how worried Karzai is about his chances against his strongest challenger.

LISA CURTIS: I think he is concerned about the inroads that the former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah has made with both the Uzbek and Tajik populations, particularly in the north. So this is an effort by Karzai to try to take away some of that vote bank from Abdullah Abdullah.

SHARP: But Abdullah is also half Pashtun which may help him win some votes away from President Karzai. Pashtuns make up almost half the population. They’re the largest ethnic group with about 13 million people followed by Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks. Selig Harrison of the Center for International Policy says Karzai is working hard to secure both Uzbek and Hazara votes because he’s uncertain about how he’ll do among Tajiks and his own group, Pashtuns.

SELIG HARRISON: When it’s all over, if we are able to see where the votes were cast in ethnic terms, we will see that the Uzbek-Hazara alliance was important to Karzai.

SHARP: One reason Karzai has less allegiance among Pashtuns then you might expect is Pashtun resentment over the fact that ethnic Tajiks now dominate the security posts in Karzai’s government. Harrison believes that anger has helped drive Pashtuns into the ranks of the Taliban. He says the reality of ethnic and regional loyalties shows how weak Afghan national institutions really are.

HARRISON: We’re a very long way from a quote “modern” Afghanistan, in which ethnic and tribal identities are subordinated to some sort of national government. And any order that is developed in Afghanistan will have to take it into account, the fact that it’s always been a very decentralized country.

SHARP: On the other hand, just because it’s decentralized, doesn’t mean it wants to split apart, says Amin Tarzi, director of Middle East Studies at the Marine Corps University. He says he doesn’t like comparing Iraq and Afghanistan but it’s worth pointing out that the role of ethnicity is quite different in each country. In the relatively young country of Iraq, a strong dictatorial state was used to hold disparate ethnicities together. Once Saddam was gone, centrifugal forces threatened to tear it apart. In Afghanistan, Tarzi says, rival ethnic groups still feel part of a larger entity, Afghanistan.

AMIN TARZI: In all of these times Afghanistan could have split it never did. There is an Afghanness. As much exclusivity as there is there, there is an inclusive Afghan nation system. Yes the Soviet invasion in 1979 destroyed it, it halted it, but still it’s there. Afghanistan is an older country and there’s a lot of pride in that system – stay together because there is that notion. You don’t have these people saying okay we’re going to split.

SHARP: Tarzi is heartened that the election is taking place at all but he’s clearly worried by the violence and lack of hope Afghans are living with. Alex Thier is also worried. He directs the Future of Afghanistan Project at the US Institute of Peace. Thier fears insecurity will hamper the vote and he’s concerned about Afghans crying fowl over the results, especially if Karzai wins outright on the first round.

ALEX THIER: The best thing that could happen for Afghanistan’s democracy, I believe, would be for this election to go into a second round and for there to be probably President Karzai and one other challenger who can really make a strong case for their vision for the future. So far the Afghan election has not really been based on platforms; it’s been based on personalities, which is not a strong basis for the election.

SHARP: No one’s saying the outcome of tomorrow’s election will solve Afghanistan’s problems, but the hope at least is that it won’t make them worse. For The World I’m Jeb Sharp.

MULLINS: You can hear more about Afghanistan on Jeb Sharp’s history podcast, ‘How We Got Here.’ Check out Afghanistan’s precarious moment. Just visit The World dot org slash history to subscribe.

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.

LISA MULLINS: None of the candidates has convincingly addressed an issue that’s as crucial to Afghan families as security is – that’s the infant death rate and the chronic malnutrition of Afghan children who survive. The BBC’s Hugh Sykes went to a hospital in the Afghan capital, Kabul.

HUGH SYKES: According to the World Health Organization one mother dies every half hour in Afghanistan because of birth problems and out of every 1000 babies who are born successfully nearly a fifth don’t survive. The babies die either in the womb or from oxygen starvation from prolonged delivery, or bleeding during birth, or infection immediately afterwards. And many who survive birth then die because mothers stop breastfeeding too soon. Not because they want to but because men want them to. This is the senior pediatrician here, Dr. [PH] Goul Hutai.

GOUL HUTAI: Some elders in the family they believe that if they give the breastfeed to the child the child will die so they discontinue breastfeeding and they start bottle feeding and as you know in Afghanistan hygienic conditions are not very much satisfactory so children get diarrhea and that’s another cause for death.

SYKES: So bottle feeding is a very bad idea in a country where there’s no availability of guaranteed clean water.

HUTAI: Yes, yes it’s really a bad idea for bottle feeding and better to encourage breastfeeding at least up to six month of age.

SYKES: But some mothers breastfeed for too long causing malnutrition. Because they provide only breast milk, nothing else, for babies up to one and a half years old.

HUTAI: In Afghan families, traditionally, the women they are not allowed to decide for the child or for themselves like a childbearing and also when to start breastfeeding, when to stop, and how to give the supplementary food. Usually elder of the families and men take the decision. So if the women will have more strength and more freedom of course it will put a good effect, especially when we educate the women.

SYKES: How do you get that message through to the men?

HUTAI: Difficult question. We just can argue and at least to some extent that they can decide for themselves in some aspect if not in all aspects of life.

[BABY CRYING]

SYKES: We’re standing next to a little baby in cot now – tiny, tiny baby and she’s got tubes attached to her cheek; attached to her wrist. What’s her name? How old is she? Why is she here?

HUTAI: She’s 28 days old. Her name Sarah and she’s admitted for neonatal sepsis. She’s unable to feed and she needs oxygen. For this she has tube in the mouth and in the nose.

SYKES: Neonatal sepsis…

HUTAI: Neonatal sepsis.

SYKES: …is what?

HUTAI: It’s an infection of neonatal period – from first day of life up to one month.

SYKES: So she has to be fed and given oxygen?

HUTAI: Yes.

SYKES: And she’s fast asleep. Is she strong? Will she be alright do you think?

HUTAI: She’s much better now. After we started treatment with antibiotics she’s doing better. Now she’s much active then before and we hope that she will recover very soon and she will be alright.

SYKES: Sitting patiently next to Sarah’s cot her grandmother [PH] Parveen who thinks things are getting worse for babies in Afghanistan.

PARVEEN: [SPEAKING DARI]

SYKES: She told me, I think there are more sick children here now then when I was a mother 20 years ago.

MULLINS: BBC reporter Hugh Sykes sent us that report from the French Medical Institute for Children in Kabul.

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.

LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. Lebanon is widely associated with civil war, assassinations, and religious rivalries yet its capital, Beirut, is one of the tolerant cities in the region. In fact gays and lesbians live relatively hassle-free lives in Beirut. Even so as Ben Gilbert reports the city has a ways to go before you could call it the San Francisco of the Arab world.

BEN GILBERT: Being gay is hard enough in the US but imagine being gay in a country like Lebanon where Mediterranean machismo meets Arab religious and cultural conservatism. That was the environment Elias Haddad had to confront when he had his first sexual experience with a male friend as a young teenager. Haddad said the encounter left him feeling confused and guilty.

ELIAS HADDAD: I tried everything to be straight. I went out with girls and I started to do sports and do what all the guys do just to be straight.

GILBERT: Haddad, who’s real name has been changed to protect his identity, didn’t have another homosexual experience until 10 years later. Now he’s out of the closet to everyone he knows except his parents and family.

HADDAD: Because they will not accept it first of all. They will treat me as a sick guy. They will do anything to reverse me to a straight guy. They will not talk to me.

GILBERT: Still Haddad lives a life like any gay man would in Europe or America. There are dozens of gay-friendly bars, nightclubs, and cafes in the more cosmopolitan neighborhoods of Beirut like the one I met Haddad in called Hamra. But it is technically illegal to be gay here and social rules and honor codes can stigmatize gays and their families jeopardizing jobs and their lives.

GHASSAN MAKAREM: We’re finding out that there are many, many cases of unreported domestic violence against gay men in the homes.

GILBERT: That’s Ghassan Makarem, an activist with Helem, a Lebanese civil society organization that advances the rights of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders. He sits in a gay-friendly café near where I met Haddad. Helem is the only organization that overtly advocates for gay rights in the Arab world. They have an office and community center near downtown Beirut.

MAKAREM: We’re developing a trauma service in case someone was tortured or faced any kind of trauma for two reasons. The main reason is that we do have some cases of people coming in who are victims of domestic violence from their fathers or older brothers and it’s usually young, effeminate men. The other case is that we have a few Iraqi refugees here who are coming into Helem who were tortured because of their sexuality in Iraq and they have to flee.

GILBERT: But Helem’s over-arching goal is overturn law 534 which makes it illegal for people to engage in “unnatural acts” and is used to prosecute gays in Lebanon. But changing attitudes may prove easier than changing the law. Only one of Lebanon’s 128 members of parliament – his name is Ghassan Moukheiber – is willing to even speak publicly about gay and lesbian rights in Lebanon. Moukheiber says decriminalizing homosexuality isn’t even on the Lebanese parliament’s agenda.

GHASSAN MOUKHEIBER: There’s no push. There’s nothing in parliament yet. The only effort is within civil society and it’s only starting.

GILBERT: Moukheiber says Lebanon’s powerful religious institutions, both Muslim and Christian, will probably block any effort to abolish the law used to prosecute gays. The divisions cross Lebanon’s mix of communities and religions – even age groups. When the American University of Beirut hosted a discussion of homosexuality, a first for the school, opinions in the crowd of 200 ranged from Liberal to deeply conservative. Helem’s Makarem, who was one of the panelists at the discussion, takes all this in stride. He says at least people are talking about the issue and with time he hopes to see perceptions toward the gay and lesbian community change along with the law.

MAKAREM: Our idea is to normalize the issue and then society as a whole and not just find a ghetto to live in because that’s very easy. You can always do that.

GILBERT: Elias Haddad, the gay man whose parents don’t know about his sexuality has had a boyfriend for nearly two years. He says he’s happy now that he’s accepted that he’s gay. He just wishes he could tell his parents.

HADDAD: I want to live my life actually. I want them to know and I don’t want to hide from them and the only issue, the family. That’s it.

GILBERT: For The World I’m Ben Gilbert in Beirut.

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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LISA MULLINS: Homosexuality was illegal in England until 1967 and Alan Turing was a victim of that law. Turing was a celebrated mathematician. He contributed to the defeat of Germany in World War II by cracking secret Nazi codes. But Alan Turing was also gay and that caused him trouble. The 1996 TV movie, “Breaking the Code,” dramatized Touring’s life. Here Touring, played by Derek Jacobi, gets some advice from his boss played by Richard Johnson.

RICHARD JOHNSON: I do you think you might be a little more discreet. Tongues are beginning to work.

DEREK JACOBI: Am I in for the lesson in morals?

JOHNSON: And common sense. I mean I don’t give a dam whether you choose to g to bed with crows boys or with Cocker Spaniels but it would be wiser to keep your private life to yourself.

JACOBI: Is this an official reprimand?

JOHNSON: Friendly advice. Nothing more.

MULLINS: Once Alan Touring’s secret was out he was forced to undergo hormonal treatments which did him harm. Touring’s life unraveled and he killed himself in 1954. He was 41. Now there’s a campaign afoot to get the British government to apologize for the way it treated Touring. Richard Gill is one of hundreds of people who’ve signed a petition. He’s a professor of mathematical statistics at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and he is an admirer of Touring.

RICHARD GILL: Alan Touring is one of the giants of the 20^th century. I think, as far as I know, a perfectly decent man. He did such important work. He did so much important work for Britain and the US for that matter. And then his life to come to an end in such a dismal way is really, really sad and I think it would be good to make the symbol that top authorities apologize for what went wrong.

MULLINS: What is your own personal connection to Alan Touring?

GILL: Well I have some sort of small, old, personal connections. For instance, my mother actually worked at Bletchly Park during the war where they were breaking the codes, applying the algorithms which Touring had figured it out in order to break the secret codes which were being used to target the U-boats – to sink British and American shipping. So my mother was one of many young ladies who just sat there turning wheels on machines for doing long calculations, long multiplications and additions and so on. And it’s very exciting because they knew they had broken the codes from time to time. That’s one little connection.

MULLINS: As you say he was a brilliant mathematician. What did it take in that time to break the Nazi code?

GILL: It’s like solving a puzzle – like solving a Sudoko puzzle. You know you have to systematically try this and this and this. If you very systematically do the right steps in the right order. It’s like getting out of a maze. You know if you keep your right hand on the wall you will get out. So in that sense he didn’t invent the computer for solving that, he invented a method, an algorithm we would say.

MULLINS: Alan Touring was called the father of computer science. Can you tell us why?

GILL: Well he talked very deeply about what a computer could do so I would just call him like the father of theoretical computer science or a father of theoretical computer science and all these ideas of the theory of codes a cryptography – making secret codes. That’s a whole lot of development in mathematics and in computer science which are all around this circle of ideas and a whole lot of modern technology like whether or not your internet banking is safe and things like that sort of depends on these ideas – this kind of mathematics – and it’s a basis of a lot of important computer science and computer applications.

MULLINS: Hmm interesting. Richard Gill, professor of mathematical statistics at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Thank you very much.

GILL: It was a great pleasure.

MULLINS: Several hundred people have signed a petition to get the British government to issue a formal apology for its treatment of Alan Touring.

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.

LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH in Boston. Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, appears to be facing a rebellion in his parliament. There are objections to his choices for cabinet ministers and he has delayed formally nominating anybody. Ahmadinejad has announced that he wants two women among his ministers. If they are approved it would mark the first time since the Islamic Revolution, 30 years ago, that women have been chosen to be part of the government. As The World’s Laura Lynch reports, not all Iranians see the move as a step forward for women.

LAURA LYNCH: In every protest against the government that followed June’s disputed elections women were there in their thousands spilling onto sidewalks, venting their anger, calling for change. For so many of them change meant more freedom, freedom to express themselves, to pursue careers, and to choose what kind of clothes to wear including the headscarf. Now a breakthrough with word that at least two women may make it into the president’s cabinet. But take a closer look says Massoumeh Tormeh. She specializes in Iranian politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

MASSOUMEH TORMEH: If you look at this as two women being proposed for ministerial posts, we should be celebrating that because it’s women’s status in Iran and we would think that perhaps this would help women’s rights in Iran. But in fact the two women who have been chosen are hardline conservative Islamic thinkers and in that way no different to any of the men ministerial proposals.

LYNCH: Tormeh points out that both women, Fatemeh Ajorlou and Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi, want laws to make it even more difficult for women to get divorced, get custody of their children, or have an abortion. Ajorlou also advocates punishing women who ignore the Islamic dress code. Given all that it’s likely their views clash with the woman who galvanized much of the opposition in the election.

ZARAH RAHNAVARD: [SPEAKING FARSI]

LYNCH: Zarah Rahnavard, wife of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, made it clear to me in this interview in Tehran during the campaign, while she wasn’t interested in serving in government; she believed it was critical to fight for women’s rights. Rahnavard’s criticism of the government was pivotal. She herself was a revolutionary working to overthrow the Shah three decades ago. One of her targets back them was the country’s last woman minister, Mahnaz Afkhami.  Afkhami was the minister of women’s affairs under the Shah. She now lives in exile in Maryland.

MAHNAZ AFKHAMI: I believe that the women who participated in the revolution, and they did in large numbers, many of them actually were pushing for more rights. They were pushing for more freedoms. They were pushing for more equality and not less and that’s why the disappointment was so great when the revolution ended up in taking away the rights that they had already gained.

LYNCH: Afkhami acknowledges the Shah’s regime was seen as corrupt. She also felt the anger of the revolutionaries. She escaped but her other former female cabinet colleague was executed, convicted of what the revolutionary government called prostitution.

AFKHAMI: Prostitution is a code word for activism – at least it was during the early part of the revolution. And for instance the fatwa that Ayatollah Khomeini issued when women gained franchise was that political participation for women is tantamount to prostitution.

LYNCH: But over the years women in Iran have become increasingly politically active even when it’s meant risking jail. Massoumeh Tormeh believes that may be why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has signaled his willingness to give women a seat at the cabinet table.

TORMEH: I think the reason why he’s doing this is because over the past four years of his presidency he has been seen to have been antagonistic towards women. The number of women who have been arrested, taken to prison – women’s rights activists I mean – has increased tremendously during the past four years. And women have had a very adverse opinion of Ahmadinejad.

LYNCH: Still there’s no guarantee even these conservative, hardline women will make it to the inner circle. The nominees still have to be approved by parliament and the Islamic establishment has never allowed a woman to be a leader even of cabinet department. For The World I’m Laura Lynch in London.

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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LISA MULLINS: It’s not clear who’s been lying and who’s been telling the truth. What is clear is that bogus has been introduced in lawsuits that Nicaraguan peasants have filed against the fruit and vegetable company Dole. The lawsuits have been brought on behalf of thousands of Nicaraguans who worked on Dole’s banana plantations – that was in the 1960s and 70s. The workers claim that a pesticide Dole used made them sterile. That chemical has proved dangerous but many of the sterility tests introduced as evidence were fake. Steve Stecklow reports on the case in today’s Wall Street Journal. He says that the story really began more than 30 years ago.

STEVE STECKLOW: In 1977 it was discovered at a manufacturing plant for this pesticide, known as DBCT, that it was causing male workers to become sterile. And by 1979 the EPA essentially banned all uses, including bananas. Dole chose to keep using it however and Dole continued to use it down in Nicaragua until 1980 even though it had been definitively linked to male sterility.

MULLINS: Why did they still use it then?

STECKLOW: Well it was very effective and also Dole said that there was no indication that it caused problems for agricultural workers and that’s been the source of litigation almost ever since. I mean we’re now something – 30 years beyond – and they’re still getting hit with lawsuits because of that decision.

MULLINS: Okay so talk about some of these individual workers on the banana plantations who have been filing, as you said, many lawsuits. Give us an example of one particular worker who you spoke with.

STECKLOW: Well Marco Sergio Medrano is probably a typical worker – poorly educated, illiterate. Says he worked on banana plantations something like 30 years ago and like thousands of other Nicaraguans became a plaintiff in lawsuits against Dole.

MULLINS: This is the guy who’s 49 years old who worked on these plantations. What was he doing?

STECKLOW: Well what he says his job was he was an assistant to the irrigator which meant that he was directly involved in spraying this pesticide on the banana plants. Dole disputes that. I mean they claim that a lot of these people never even worked on banana plantations. But again Madrano insists that he did and that was what his job was.

MULLINS: Okay so he hears this ad on the radio saying look if you worked on a banana plantation for Dole you can be part of this lawsuit. Who put out the ad and then who ended up representing him?

STECKLOW: The radio ad was financed by a Los Angeles personal injury lawyer named Juan Dominguez and he has hired a local lawyer down in Chinandega to essentially find plaintiffs for this case and Mr. Madrano responded to one of those ads.

MULLINS: And how many other people responded?

STECKLOW: Thousands. As of now there’s over 13,000 plaintiffs in all the cases. They’re not all Dominguez’s cases but many of them are. I think Dominguez has over 4000. In fact the number of plaintiffs is larger than the actual number of banana workers who ever worked on Dole operated plants. That doesn’t seem to be in much dispute.

MULLINS: So what is primarily in dispute here? I mean what is the larger picture of what’s going on in all of these suits?

STECKLOW: Well the larger picture is that no one seems to dispute that there was massive fraud in recruiting plaintiffs – that there’s too many of them. That a series of American lawyers went down to Nicaragua, kind of set up shop, hired local council, and started recruiting them. But they recruited so many of them that it’s not really plausible that they all worked on the farms let alone would have been exposed to the pesticide. So unfortunately for those peasants who actually may have been exposed and become sterile, all of the cases now seem to be in doubt because there was so much fraud going on.

MULLINS: So what’s the status of all these cases now?

STECKLOW: Well unfortunately for a lot of the plaintiffs down in Nicaragua the status is really in limbo. A judge in California ruled in June. She threw out two of the cases based on what she described as massive fraud including fake sterility tests. And now Dole lawyers are trying to use this to toss out dozens and dozens of other cases that are either in the United States or down in Nicaragua.

MULLINS: So who are, to the extent that we know, who are the victims and who are the culprits?

STECKLOW: Well I think the victims really are the peasants who may have been hurt by this who will probably never see any money and really have been kind of exploited all along the way. And that’s really the real tragedy here. I mean the judge in California said that the sad thing is that people with legitimate claims are likely never to win anything because no one’s ever going to believe them given the magnitude of the fraud that went on.

MULLINS: Alright thank you for telling us the story. Steve Stecklow is the deputy bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal in Boston. His article about fraud by trial lawyers in these pesticide lawsuits appears in the Wall Street Journal, today’s edition. Thank you very much for telling us this story Steve.

STECKLOW: My pleasure. Thank you Lisa.

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LISA MULLINS: These are tough times too for fruit and vegetable producers in France and true to French tradition they’re threatening strikes and protests if the government doesn’t do something. The World’s Gerry Hadden sends us this report from Brittany in western France.

GERRY HADDEN: At the Sunday outdoor market in the small coastal village of Plomeur local farmers sells cheese, sausage, and the season’s fruits and vegetables. One vendor named Valerie Vigier hawks pears. It’s not going well. Competition is strong because the harvest has been good and on top of that the European Union’s agriculture ministry in Brussels has just ordered France’s fruit and vegetable farmers to repay some $700 million in subsidies they received from the French government – subsidies handed out more than 10 years ago.

VALERIE VIGIER: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

TRANSLATOR: For me it’s totally unfair. It’s already hard enough for the farmers to make a living. Now they’re asking us to pay back this subsidy. It makes no sense. I imagine your employer must be covering your travel expenses. So what if in 10 years they ask you to pay it back. It’s unfair.

HADDEN: And unrealistic. Farm association leaders say the money in question went to more than half of France’s fruit and vegetable farmers. Many have retired, closed shop, moved, or even died. The funds were to help them export their produce. Brussels says the subsidies constituted an unfair trade practice giving the French an advantage over other European farmers. But strawberry vendor Patrick Keuleuf says that’s hypocritical.

PATRICK KEULEUF: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

HADDEN: He says sure we’ve been aided by the French state but some of our competitors, like Spain, they pay their immigrant laborers from Morocco or Algeria $8 to $10 a day. That’s a fair of unfair trade too.

Concern here mounted last week when France’s agriculture minister, Bruno Le Maire, told a newspaper that he’d enforce Brussels’s ruling. But the ensuing uproar saw him back pedal a bit.

BRUNO LE MAIRE: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

HADDEN: He went on TV to say that he’d like to be able to examine each subsidy case by case. No producer in a vulnerable position who fears for his livelihood will have to pay the money back he said.

Farmers however don’t seem convinced. One farm leader warned Paris and Brussels that if even one farmer has to return the years-old export subsidy the French countryside will burn. Tough words aimed at bureaucrats. But France’s summer farm crisis doesn’t end there. In fact it reaches all the way to the sea and under it. The country’s multi-million dollar oyster industry is even deeper peril. A stroll along the fisherman’s port in the nearby city of Lorient illustrates the point. It’s 7 o’clock on a Saturday morning. Normally the oyster farmers would still be out here readying the day’s harvest for market but they’re finishing earlier and earlier because there are fewer and fewer oysters. A mysterious illness is wiping out baby oysters. On some farms the mortality rate is 100 percent. At Lorient’s bustling seafood market an oyster farmer named Jean Claude digs through a bin to show me what the oyster malady does.

JEAN CLAUDE: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

HADDEN: Here’s one he says. He points to a baby oyster forming on the shell of an adult. Normally he says it stays there for about two months before separating. But as you can see with the illness the bond cracks at six weeks. You’ll need to talk to the scientists if you want answers as to why.

Scientists suspect a strain of the herpes virus is behind the oyster deaths. Test results won’t be in for a few weeks. In the meantime one hypothesis is that steadily warming sea water has given such diseases more traction. Oysters are particularly vulnerable because they filter huge amounts of seawater to feed themselves. This is the second year of dying oyster beds. And for the French, especially in Brittany, we’re not talking about just any old shellfish. We’re talking about a way of life. At Le Jardin Gourmand restaurant in Lorient chef Natalie Bove says she can’t imagine the possibility of her oysters disappearing.

NATALIE BOVE: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

TRANSLATOR: When you eat an oyster from Brittany you have the impression that you’re tasting the sea itself. The sea is our identity.

HADDEN: France lost all of its oysters once before about 40 years ago, also due to disease. Farmers repopulated with Pacific oysters from Japan which have proved more resistant. No one knows what might happen if those oysters fall pray to illness too. For The World I’m Gerry Hadden, Brittany, France.

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.