• India: Afghanistan’s influential ally
• In pictures: Kabul attack

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MARCO WERMAN: As we mentioned earlier the big news from Afghanistan today was the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul. It was the second such attack on India’s embassy there in a little over a year. India’s role in Afghanistan is often overlooked here in the US but New Delhi is one of Afghanistan’s largest donors. It’s pledged more than a billion dollars for policing, education, and infrastructure. The World’s Matthew Bell takes a look at what India’s growing influence in Afghanistan means for Washington.

MATTHEW BELL: There’s a line of thinking about US involvement in Afghanistan and it goes like this: If the road to success in Kabul runs through Islamabad, Pakistan then the road to success in Islamabad runs through New Delhi, India. Daniel Markey is an expert on South Asia at the council on foreign relations.

DANIEL MARKEY: The logic is that when Pakistan looks out into the world and in particular when it looks to Afghanistan it feels encircled by India. And the idea would be sitting here in Washington if somehow we could help Pakistan to help feel less threatened by India in Afghanistan maybe Pakistan would be more helpful to Washington.

BELL: What would be most helpful would be for Pakistan to crack down harder on militant and extremist groups including the Pakistani Taliban that are crossing into Afghanistan and causing chaos. But here’s the problem Pakistan’s intelligence services have been linked to those extremist groups because the militants are sworn enemies of India and they’ve been especially active in the volatile region of Kashmir. So in short, if the US could solve the Kashmir issue Washington would do itself a huge favor in Afghanistan. As a candidate Barack Obama even talked about this but his administration has steered clear of making it a priority. It’s true that the US and India have many shared goals in Afghanistan. However South Asia expert MJ Gohel says there’s very little political will in India for making concessions on Kashmir for the sake of succeeding in Afghanistan.

MJ GOHEL: Even if the relationship between India and Pakistan were to be normalized it will not solve the problem of the Taliban, of al-Qaeda and a number of the other Jihadi groups which are entrenched within Pakistan. So these are two separate issues. Kashmir can be resolved tomorrow but terrorism isn’t going to end with that.

BELL: Indians credit George W. Bush with quote de-hyphenating the US approach to South Asia. In other words it stopped dealing with India-Pakistan as a single troubled region. There has been some nervousness in India that President Obama might re-hyphenate the two countries so to speak but Pramit Palchuadhuri, foreign editor of the Hindustan Times in New Delhi, says those fears have not materialized. For example he says Mr. Obama sent a subtle message to India at the recent G20 meeting in Pittsburg.

PRAMIT PALCHUADHURI: He had a dinner in which India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was placed, ended up sitting right next to him. And when we asked Indian officials how did this happen. They said it was purely random.

BELL: But Palchuadhuri says someone at the White House explained things to him differently. The editor says his inside source told him there was nothing random about the seating arrangement and that President Obama specifically asked to be seated next to the Indian prime minister. For The World I’m Matthew Bell.

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• BBC profile of Abdullah
• FAQ Afghan election

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. The Taliban have claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing this morning in Kabul, Afghanistan. The blast outside the Indian Embassy killed at least 17 people. The bombing put the government of President Hamid Karzai on the defensive from a security standpoint. Karzai is already on the ropes politically. He’s battling allegations of vote fraud that marred the presidential election there in August. A partial recount is still in progress. Karzai’s main opponent in that election was Abdullah Abdullah. We spoke to him from Kabul. Abdullah says he still has faith in the election process.

ABDULLAH ABDULLAH: I think from what we have seen even in the past four days when the process of audit and recount has started. It’s absolutely impossible to announce Mr. Karzai as the winner without ignoring the fraud. So I think that the eventuality of a runoff is much more than that possibility. And I hope that fraud is not ignored.

WERMAN: Do you think President Karzai has changed or has the west perception of him changed?

ABDULLAH: I think the perception might have been different at the beginning of him as a person which believes in the principle and values of democracy and as far as the Afghans are concerned national unity and the rights of citizens and so on so forth and a clean person that was the perception. But later on the record is quite different and that is a sad reality unfortunately.

WERMAN: As you know 17 civilians died in a bombing in Kabul today and Americans are listening to you Dr. Abdullah. Parents of soldiers are listening. And eight years on from 9/11 can you explain to American parents, and European parents for that matter, the reason why their children should risk their lives in your country.

ABDULLAH: Yes unfortunately today this happened in Kabul in just like a kilometer from where I am speaking to you. The Afghans and the Americans are fighting the same enemy who inflicted the tragedies of 9/11 upon the people of the United States and many more tragedies here. And so what’s the future? If Afghanistan has to be a land where its people live at peace with each other and with the rest of the world we have to work together – Afghans and Americans – in the true spirit of partnership in order to save Afghanistan so Afghanistan is a safe place for its own citizens and also it’s not a source of threat for the rest of the world including the United States. Because you know that in this region terrorism and extremism had established its roots in the past decades, two decades. But eight years down the road we should have been in a much better situation than where we are today. That is disappointing – that we are still talking about more troops, more casualties in Afghanistan.

WERMAN: But if the US decides it’s going to fight a different war now – that it’s going to fight al-Qaeda and not the Taliban?

ABDULLAH: I think al-Qaeda and the Taliban they are so mixed up. They are helping one another and they’re part of the same strategy. You cannot distinguish between the two.

WERMAN: But there are al-Qaeda fighters all over the world right now – North Africa, Somalia – and maybe the emphasis will be less on Afghanistan, your country.

ABDULLAH: No I think the basis and the main stronghold is in the areas bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan. There is no doubt about that. It’s from these areas that al-Qaeda rules and controls its networks throughout the world. And I think the focus on Afghanistan and the renewed commitment by the democratic administration is the right strategy if I may say so. But how to make sure that with this commitment comes betterment of the situation in lessening of that threat. I think that’s what I call working between the United States, Afghanistan, and Pakistan as well. It’s I think for the three countries to work together in order to deal with this good hope that by dealing with this challenge here we have lesser and lesser problems elsewhere around the world.

WERMAN: So would you support a surge of American troops in Afghanistan? I mean what should the American role be there right now?

ABDULLAH: No I think when General McChrystal, the commander of the American forces in Afghanistan, asked for more troops. He needs it and we need it. And hopefully this surge will help stabilize the situation parallel to another effort which is to strengthen institutions so the Afghan institutions, the Afghan National Army, will assume its responsibilities or take more responsibility in the upcoming times.

WERMAN: Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, candidate for president of Afghanistan, awaiting like the rest of the world the results of the August election from the electoral complaints commission there. Thank you very much for speaking with us.

ABDULLAH: You’re welcome.

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• BBC Africa Have Your Say
• Zimbabwe’s media ‘still not free’

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH Boston. Zimbabwe is a country in transition. For decades it’s been led by President Robert Mugabe. During his tenure Zimbabwe went from being Southern Africa’s bread basket to the region’s basket case. The country suffered hyperinflation, food scarcity, and devastating rates of HIV. The challenges remain but there have been some changes. Last year Mugabe formed a power-sharing government with opposition leader Morgan Tsvangarai. And it’s easier now for foreign news outlets to get into Zimbabwe to report on conditions there. Today Farayi Mungazi hosted the BBC program Africa Have Your Say from Zimbabwe. Farayi Mungazi you’re actually hosting from the township of Chitungwiza. This is your hometown. When was the last time you were there?

FARAYI MUNGAZI: It was just over 18 months ago and things have changed. I mean you can go through what has happened in this country and you know have things remain the same. There is absolutely no chance of that happening. And yes a lot of things have changed. The state of the roads, the state of the houses. You know the way people view their futures. Everything has changed.

WERMAN: What about basic needs? You know food and healthcare. I mean if you go into a supermarket in your hometown, what do you find in there?

MUNGAZI: You find the shops are full. The food is there. You can get anything you want but the million dollar question is: Do you have the money to buy it? If you look back two years ago – maybe actually a year ago – I mean these shelves were empty. Nothing in the supermarkets. Nothing in the shops to buy.

WERMAN: Yeah where’s that food coming from then?

MUNGAZI: Well some of it is manufactured locally. A lot of it is imported. And I think things have drastically improved. I mean the food is coming since the dollarization of the economy because people now can have access to hard currency. They’ve got proper money. You can go to petrol station and get some gas. You couldn’t do that just over a year ago. You know you had to cue overnight. But these days just drive up to a gas station and off you go.

WERMAN: So there are things there but can people afford them? I mean do people have jobs?

MUNGAZI: The majority don’t. I think the unemployment figure in this country is close to 80%. I mean that is an astronomical figure indeed. So it is a question of there are those who can afford but the overwhelming majority cannot afford it. I mean especially those in the rural areas. I mean the dollarization of the economy has managed to bring down inflation. That’s fine. Everybody you know likes that. But where do people have access to US dollars from? They don’t. And that is the big problem.

WERMAN: The government of Zimbabwe has placed restrictions on international reporters for years. President Mugabe has often accused the media of being biased against him. And the BBC, which co-produces our program, has not been able to operate freely inside Zimbabwe for eight years. Are we seeing an opening up of Zimbabwe with your permission granted to go inside and host this program?

MUNGAZI: Absolutely. In fact I had a meeting last week with the minister of information who welcomed me and the BBC with open arms and said look let’s burry the hatchet. What happened in the past should be in the past. We want to show people that Zimbabwe is open for business and we want to show people that we have nothing to hide. As such we want the BBC, CNN, wherever you are, if you want to come in as a journalist you know come in and report whatever you’d like to report. And I have to say that I mean I’ve been here going t different places, meeting different people, and there is absolutely no restrictions whatsoever on my movement so one has to say that the Zimbabwean government is keeping its side of the bargain. And luckily because they want to give a different image of the country. They want people to have a different perspective of Zimbabwe.

WERMAN: Robert Mugabe said this week that he was open to fresh, friendly, and cooperative relations with all those countries that have been hostile to us. However a state department spokesman urged Mugabe to end politicized arrests and to replace what he described as Zimbabwe’s corrupt attorney general and reserve bank governor. So obviously things are not as rosy as some of the descriptions you’ve given us.

MUNGAZI: No it isn’t rosy. Certainly not from the political side. I mean if you’re looking at the political side that is a totally different perspective. I think this is what the international community; this is what the state department overseas will be looking at. This is what the international governments, the European Union, will be looking at. How is the political agreement? Is it working or not? Now they have to say there are so many disagreements from the parties involved and that is obviously you know at the end of the day that is what is going to make Zimbabwe either prosper or fail. Because at the end of the day people aren’t going to judge Zimbabwe by the fact you know there are things in the shops. They are going to be judged on what’s happening on the political side and there there are so many disagreements. Nobody can dispute that.

WERMAN: That was the BBC’s Farayi Mungazi, host of Africa Have Your Say, speaking to us from his hometown in Zimbabwe.

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• BBC profile
• Nobelprize.org

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World. Romanian born German writer, Herta Muller, has won this year’s Nobel Prize for literature. Muller grew up in Romania under the dictatorship of Nicolai Ceausescu and in the shadow of World War II. She later emigrated to West Germany. Her work reflects those experiences depicting what the Nobel committee called the landscape of the dispossessed. The World’s Jeb Sharp has this profile.

JEB SHARP: You may not have heard of Herta Muller but she’s well known in the German speaking world. Her life and writing span many of the most terrifying experiences in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. Part of what makes her so interesting is that she’s German but not German. She grew up a member of Romania’s ethnic German minority.

BRIGID HAINES: She writes in German but she always says that her writing is very influenced by the Romanian language in way more poetic and has lots of lovely metaphors which she incorporates into German.

SHARP: That’s Brigid Haines, head of modern languages at Swansea University in the UK.

HAINES: Her father was an SS officer and that’s something that’s always disturbed her because she never quite knew what he did in the war. So she had to deal with the legacy of the German guilt. But at the same time she was growing up in a totalitarian regime.

SHARP: And not just any totalitarian regime but that of the hard line Nicolai Ceausescu. Not surprisingly one of Muller’s big themes is dictatorship. By the time she was a student she was in trouble with the authorities as an intellectual and dissenter. Later she was fired from her job as a translator because she refused to collaborate with the Romanian secret police. Muller draws continually on her life in Romania in her writing says Haines.

HAINES: This is an experience that she can’t leave behind. It’s taken hold of her and she writes extraordinarily well about it.

SHARP: Haines got to know Muller a few years ago when she was a writer in residence at Swansea. She says she was great with the students especially in bringing to life what it was like to leave Romania and come to the west – in her case Berlin in the late 1980s.

HAINES: One of her books was reviewed in Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper, and she wanted copies of this review. And so she went out and bought 20 copies of Die Zeit. What she didn’t know was that you can photocopy in the west. Because in her experience the only photocopiers in the country, in Romania, were owned by the secret police. She’s a very good ambassador for … . Well for keeping alive the sense of horror and terror and the lasting trauma of dictatorship.

SHARP: But what sets Muller apart is her use of language. She writes novels, essays, poems, and even creates collages out of words and pictures. Poetic is the word that comes up most to describe even her prose. Lyn Marven of the University of Liverpool says her German is infused with Romanian imagery.

LYN MARVEN: The novel that was translated as The Passport is actually called Humans are a Pheasant in the World. And the pheasant in German, she says the pheasant is; well you can picture a pheasant. You know it’s proud. It struts its stuff. It walks in front of cars on the road. It rules the place. But in fact in Romanian the pheasant is a loser. And so it’s one that can’t get off the ground. And that, the dual language, you know the two different backgrounds and that to me seemed very striking. That on the one hand you’ve got this beautiful bird but on the other hand it can’t fly.

SHARP: Marven says Muller often draws her metaphors from nature and the countryside. Her best known work in English is The Land of Green Plums.

MARVEN: The Land of Green Plums uses the image of the unripe plums as something that makes her feel sick. It might even be dangerous. And that’s a metaphor for the knowledge that’s inside her about her father’s past.

SHARP: Marven and other fans are celebrating Muller’s prize today despite a bit of grumbling that the Nobel literature committee is too Eurocentric.

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MARCO WERMAN: Thousands of American service men and women are deployed in Afghanistan and with every new troop rotation the number of veterans grows. The World’s Alex Gallafent met a recently returned veteran of the war.

ALEX GALLAFENT: Adam Bryant has gentle eyes. He’s lightly built and dressed in quiet clothes. And apart from the short cropped hair there’s nothing about the 24-year-old that would suggest he’s a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. But that’s where he spent 10 months as a volunteer in the US Army National Guard assigned to New York’s 27^th brigade combat team. Today he works for a veteran’s group in New York in a quiet office of small white cubicles and computers. Afghanistan you’d think would be much harsher.

ADAM BRYANT: Actually I think a lot of people have a misconception that it’s kind of you know roughing it. But it’s actually you know … . We’ve been there for what eight years now? So kind of the living conditions have actually improved substantially. But you know obviously you know when there’s explosions going on every day it’s definitely a different world in that sense.

GALLAFENT: Bryant’s tour was split in two. He finished up in Adraskan, a district in the western province of Heart, mentoring Afghan police trainees.

BRYANT: We were the first team to ever actually move in there permanently. We were actually stationed on an Afghan police base. There was 14 of us, American forces, and about 200 Afghan police officers on that training base. That was unique for sure. We had one building for us and this was right next to the barracks where the Afghan trainees were stationed. So you know you definitely felt kind of alone. You know we were not allowed to walk around the base unless you had two or three others with you. And there’s always this kind of you know who can you trust? Who can’t you? And so we were always taking precautions like that. But you know they were pretty friendly and responsive to us so in that sense it was alright.

GALLAFENT: Adam Bryant performed that kind of nation-building work at the start of his tour too in Kabul. He worked on projects to build roads, school, and wells. And in performing his duties he thought about the overall goal of the US presence in Afghanistan.

BRYANT: That is kind of the primary mission – is to improve the quality of life for the average Afghan civilian. So it was a great opportunity to be on the front lines of what our goals are there. You know I would actually argue that that pretty much is the overarching mission.

GALLAFENT: That idea of the mission makes sense if that’s what you’ve been sent to Afghanistan to do. But the Obama Administration’s stated goal is to root out anti-American terrorism. The Obama team is currently reviewing its strategy with some reports suggesting a move away from Afghanistan to focusing more on counterterrorism in Pakistan. And the nation building that Adam Bryant is talking about has run into trouble. US efforts in Afghanistan have been complicated by corrupt local officials and divided loyalties. Regardless it appears that whatever President Obama decides he’s likely to reject a dramatic pullout of American troops. That means more and more young men and women like Adam Bryant going to Afghanistan as volunteers and returning as veterans. Brant now works as a membership assistant for the nonprofit organization Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

BRYANT: Yeah there’s a lot more to it than just sending people there, accomplishing the mission. There’s a whole lifetime of care that each and every vet needs when they get home. And if we’re not prepared to do that then you know we need to be.

GALLAFENT: How has the experience been for you returning?

BRYANT: You know I was one of the lucky ones. I didn’t have any injuries to speak of so I haven’t had too hard of a time but there’s a lot of people out there who really are struggling. We had someone in our team. His name was Specialist Taylor. Dion Taylor. He was actually an NYPD police officer and he was killed in action in the southeast part of Afghanistan. And he had an eight year old son. And I guess that just kind of brought it home for me. You know it’s certainly something that more people should pay attention to in general.

GALLAFENT: Still Bryant notes that for a long time Afghanistan was known as the forgotten war. All the attention was on Iraq or more recently on other things.

BRYANT: You know things like Michaels Jackson. You know we had a lot of troops pass away during that time due to combat casualties and you just didn’t hear about it at all. It’s certainly frustrating.

GALLAFENT: But now as the administration grapples with the choices before it, Afghanistan is making big news again. For The World I’m Alex Gallafent in New York.

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World. Turkey’s prime minister has pledged to bring his country closer to its Muslim neighbors in the Arab world and he’s taken some steps on that front. For one, the government has dropped visa requirements for most Arabs. That’s gone some way in boosting Turkey’s popularity. But something that’s really fueling Arab interest is a Turkish soap opera. Matthew Brunwasser reports from Istanbul.

MATTHEW BRUNWASSER: It’s another day of tears, love, and betrayal in the beautiful waterfront mansion of the Shadoeloo family in Istanbul.

[SOUND CLIP FROM SOAP OPERA]

This is a clip from the Turkish soap opera Gumush, the name of the lead female character. In Arabic it’s called Noor. While it was a dud in Turkey, last year’s finally was watched my 85 million viewers across the Arab world. It’s so popular that Turkish tour operators started getting phone calls from Arabs asking how they could see the shows glamorous locations.

TOUR GUIDE: [SPEAKING ARABIC]

BRUNWASSER: On this boat tour of the Bosphorous in Istanbul, the high point for many Arab visitors is seeing the house where Noor was filmed. Muzna a-Wad is here from Jordan and she’s a big fan.

MUZNA A-WAD: Yes I like Noor. Because the actors are beautiful. The country is very beautiful. So it makes you curious about you are going to come here and discover the country.

BRUNWASSER: Her husband Mohammad Sada says western TV is easily available in Arab countries so it’s not a big deal to see people drinking alcohol on TV, professional women with careers, or cheating spouses. But until Noor the only people who did these things on TV were Americans, Europeans, and other Westerners. Turks are fellow Muslims.

MOHAMMAD SADA: It is maybe the first time that the people, the Arab people, they watch some Muslim culture with such an openness. That’s why it was a little bit different. Some people, they were shocked about such things. They thought that Muslim culture it is supposed to be always very much restricted and very much closed.

BRUNWASSER: One Saudi cleric publicly declared the series replete with evil, wickedness, moral collapse, and a war on the virtues. But plenty watch it all the same. Noor has definitely made Turkey more attractive in the eyes of Arabs. But Sada notes it was an incident in the political arena that made Arabs see Turkey as a friend. At the Davos conference in Switzerland last January the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan rebuked Israeli President Shimon Peres over Israel’s incursion in Gaza.

SADA: When such an incident happened we feel that there is a big supporter to Arabs now – to our case. People there respect the Turkish government much more now.

BRUNWASSER: Statistics from the Turkish tourism ministry tend to back this up. For instance the number of Saudi visitors to Turkey is up by 31% compared to last year. The group travels by bus to Chamlica, a scenic spot overlooking Istanbul. Ayman Smadi is another visitor from Jordan. He lived in the US for 22 years.

AYMAN SMADI: I think the Arabs have grown to admire Turkey. To me, as somebody who lived in the States, I like the fact that you could have religious heritage. You could have a lot of culture and history and still be part of the civilized modern world.

[MUSIC]

BRUNWASSER: Tourism commercials like this one have added to Turkey’s buzz in the Arab world. But while Turkey is reaching out to the east, it’s also pursuing stronger ties with the west. And the TV show Gumush, or Noor, may be helping on that front as well. The soap opera has found new audiences as Lubire de Argint in Romania and Perla in Bulgaria. For The World I’m Matthew Brunwasser in Istanbul.

[MUSIC]

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MARCO WERMAN: There’s a tendency in the Western world to think of the terms Arab and Muslim as synonymous. But the truth is that the Arab world is only a small part of the larger Muslim world.  A new study from the Pew Research Center put some numbers on that reality. The study is called “Mapping the Global Muslim Population.” And among its findings is this: only 20 percent of the world’s Muslims live in the Middle East and North Africa. The majority, 60 percent, live in Asia. The World’s religion correspondent Jane Little has been studying the Pew survey for us. Jane, for you, what’s the most striking thing about this study?

JANE LITTLE: Well I think, really, this is a very in-depth and broad study. A quite authoritative study. I think the fact that the top ten largest Muslim populations are led by Indonesia, Pakistan and India. And only one of the top ten, that’s Egypt at number five, is in the Arab Middle East. As you suggested, we’ve often tended to conflate Muslim with Arab. And this study shows how false that is.

WERMAN: Right. And do you know what the methodology of the study was? Did the Pew survey simply go out and ask people whether they thought they were Muslim, or identified themselves as Muslim?

LITTLE: It’s taken three years to compile. And they’ve used 1500 sources, lots of census data, population surveys, demographic studies. And basically yes, they have taken self identification. If someone says they’re a Muslim then they’re counted as Muslim.

WERMAN: The top three Muslim populations by country are Indonesia, Pakistan and India. India’s pretty surprising, having the third largest Muslim population in the world.

LITTLE: Yes. It is very striking, that. We tend to think of India as Hindu. It is, in fact, overwhelmingly Hindu, but it has a huge population, over a billion, and 161 million Muslims live in India. That’s twice as many as Egypt’s population. Over twice as many as Iran’s. So that is a really striking figure.

WERMAN: Jane, let’s take a quick look, about what the survey says about Islam in two places where the faith has grown in recent years. Europe, and the U.S. First, Europe. What are the trends in Muslim demographics there?

LITTLE: Well, one of the interesting things is there’s been a lot of hot air recently about a demographic time bomb. Some studies and newspapers have suggested the Muslim population is growing massively and Muslims are taking over Europe. Of course, they’re very heavily loaded, these studies. And this is sort of a cool, calm look at the data. It doesn’t estimate growth rates, that’s a future study. But basically there are 38 million Muslims in Europe according to this study, they make up five percent of the European population and two percent of all the world’s Muslims. And the vast majority of them…like, in Russia, there are 16 million Muslims in Russia. And they account for more than four in ten of all European Muslims. And one of the interesting things the study points out is that most Muslims in Western Europe are relatively recent immigrants. Germany has a large population of four million, France does with just behind that, between three and four. But a lot of Muslims who live in Europe: Russia, Albania, Kosovo, Bulgaria, Bosnia, they’re old populations. Centuries old. And the study points out more than six in ten European Muslims are in fact indigenous.

WERMAN: Yes, you mentioned Germany, I mean, Germany has almost as many Muslims as all of the United States. What is the picture for America?

LITTLE: The whole of the Americas, North and South, have 4.6 million Muslims according to this, and more than half of them live in the U.S. 2.5 million Muslims.

WERMAN: Now, I don’t think the survey was supposed to come to any great conclusions. It’s basically telling us a lot of things we already knew. But I’ve kind of got to say, one in four people in the world is Muslim, so what?

LITTLE: Yes. You could say, “So what?” I think one of the interesting things though, is that there’s always been a lot of politicization of studies and a lot of competition for souls in Africa, for instance, between Christianity and Islam. This is an authoritative study that says there are 1.57 billion Muslims in the world. At the moment there are estimates there are over 2 billion Christians in the world, and in fact the Pew Forum plans to go ahead and do a similar study of Christianity next year. And it also plans to look at Muslim population growth. This will take a much closer look and project what the future is for Islam in the world.

WERMAN: That’s The World’s Religion Correspondent, Jane Little, in London.

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MARCO WERMAN: We move to West Africa now and the crisis in Guinea. Last week the country’s military government cracked down on protestors. Human rights groups say soldiers opened fire on civilians gathered at the national stadium killing 157 people. This happened on September 28^th inside what is officially known as the September 28^th Stadium. That was very significant to Guineans according to Elizabeth Schmidt. She teaches African history at Loyola University in Maryland.

ELIZABETH SCHMIDT: September 28^th 2009 is actually the 51^st anniversary of referendum in Guinea whereby the Guinean people voted for independence from France and Guinea was the only territory in all of the French empire to cease the opportunity to vote for independence. Everyone else voted to stay in the French empire. And so the stadium was named for that event. Very momentous in Guinean history. And this demonstration where there was the bloody massacre took place not only at that stadium but on September 28^th 51 years later.

WERMAN: Now just before declaring independence from France Guinean nationalist leader Sekou Toure made a famous speech. Here it is.

SEKOU TOURE: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

WERMAN: Alright we can barely hear what he’s saying there in French but this speech is often cited because of what Sekou Toure said – the famous no that you were referring to to France. It’s an iconic statement revered by people all across West Africa isn’t it?

SCHMIDT: It is. What he actually said in English would have been: We prefer poverty in liberty to riches in slavery. And that was a direct response to French Premiere Charles de Gaulle’s threat that if Guinea dared to vote no, even though that option was being presented to them as a possibility, but if they dared to take that opportunity to vote no they would bare the consequences that France would severely punish them.

WERMAN: Right it’s kind of a version of live free or die. And Guinea was the only colony in West Africa, the only French colony in West Africa, who went their own way.

SCHMIDT: Not only West Africa but French Equatorial Africa and other territories in the French Empire.

WERMAN: And did France live up to its threat?

SCHMIDT: Oh it did. In fact it lived up to its threat even before the referendum. De Gaulle was so convinced that Guinea was going to vote no that he started ordering the transfer of hard currency out of Guinea even before the referendum. French teachers who were working in Guinea were ordered out of the country and then after the referendum all development aid ceased. Construction projects were called to a halt including an important dam that would have given Guinea hydroelectric power it would have needed to convert bauxite reserves into aluminum. Medicines were taken out. Vehicles were stolen from health centers. They destroyed the archives. They ripped the telephones out of the walls. They even cracked the state dishes. It was vicious. And then the French also tried very hard to isolate Guinea diplomatically. And as a result Guinea turned to the east to the Soviet Union and the eastern block countries for assistance. And that became a post fact of justification. See he was a communist all along.

WERMAN: When you heard last week about these horrific things at the stadium – people shot and many killed, women raped – all in broad daylight. I’m wondering what went through your mind in terms of the historical continuum of the stadium of Guinea’s rocky history. I mean can you see a connection? Not just a coincidence between September 28^th 1958 and September 28^th 2009?

SCHMIDT: Although I haven’t seen any evidence of this, I have to believe that the decision to hold that demonstration in that stadium, on that day, September 28^th, September 28^th, was not a coincidence. That these were pro-democracy demonstrators who were getting together to protest the decision of the current military dictator to so-called run in the presidential elections that are going to be held in a few months. And when he ceased power he swore, as so many military dictators do, that he would turn power over to a civilian government and that he would not run in the upcoming presidential election. So really the demonstrators on September 28^th 2009 were in the tradition of the Guinean people who voted for independence, for liberty on September 28^th 1958. Certainly philosophically they are in that tradition.

WERMAN: Elizabeth Schmidt teaches African history at Loyola University in Maryland. She’s the author of Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea. Thank you very much for talking to us.

SCHMIDT: Thank you very much.

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.

MARCO WERMAN: By the way if you’re tempted to go out and buy one of Herta Muller’s books in a bookstore – good luck. We called a few stores to ask if they had The Land of Green Plums in stock. The results were not good. Now we admit our survey was highly unscientific but still. A famous old bookshop in one of New England’s top college towns had lots of copies when the book was first published. That was in the late 1990s. Another iconic bookshop – this one in the Pacific Northwest – said it usually has it but not today. Calls to other brick and mortar stores proved similarly disappointing. Your best bet for a copy of Herta Muller’s best known novel may be to go online. Plenty of copies there it seems of The Land of Green Plums.

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.