• President Obama’s Afghanistan plan
• Taliban insurgency
• Jeb Sharp on the mission in Afghanistan

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman.  This is The World.  Barack Obama will unveil his blueprint for the war in Afghanistan tomorrow night.  The President is slated to speak at the US Military Academy at West Point, New York.  Mr. Obama’s address will include his response to a request from the top commander in Afghanistan for tens of thousands of reinforcements.  You can be certain that President Obama’s speech will be closely watched at the military base just outside Kandahar.  That’s Afghanistan’s second largest city, and militants have been making gains in the area.  Reporter Ben Gilbert is there.  And tomorrow, Ben, President Obama is expected to make this big speech, announcing the deployment of potentially 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.  Are the troops there anticipating this speech?  Are they talking about it?

BEN GILBERT:  Well, I think there was a good example of how people are feeling about this speech.  I was at the gym last night; at the American gym is what it’s called here, because it’s an international base with NATO troops.  And they usually air football games on the TV in the gym.  In between one of the plays, a picture of Obama was projected on the screen and kind of informing troops about the speech, and immediately you saw just about everyone on the treadmills to lifting weights, about a hundred soldiers in front of me, their heads snapped up to the TV, because no one was quite sure if there was some kind of an announcement coming, or something like that.  And as soon as President Obama’s face was taken off and it returned to the football game, everyone kind of went back to their exercising.  But I think it’s being anticipated.  I think everyone is aware of it here.  Some people have mentioned that they’re going to stay up and watch it.  Some people have said they’re going to wake up and watch it, because it’s airing here at 5:30 AM on Wednesday morning.  But regardless of whether or not people are going to sleep through it or wake up and watch it, just about every single soldier and marine is aware of the implications of what Obama is going to talk about and how it affects their personal lives and also the mission here.

WERMAN: And what would change on that base in Kandahar if 30,000 more troops are deployed to Afghanistan?

GILBERT:  Well, Kandahar has been called the center of gravity of the south, and the south where I’m at right now, it’s probably the hottest.  You’ve seen the largest number of attacks, the most casualties.  This is where the majority of American troops and British troops, the Canadian troops I’m with have seen about 30 deaths each year since 2006, and they’ve only got 2,800 troops here, so you can imagine, that’s quite a large percentage of your troops being taken out every year.  So it’s a very hot area and it’s expected that this area will be the focus of a large number of those troops that President Obama is expected to be sending and for good reason.  This is where the Taliban was founded in 1994.  This is where they spread to the rest of Afghanistan and took it over, and so this area is seen as win or lose here, really.

WERMAN:  And from the military base where you are, Ben, what signs are there that militants are making gains, that there is a hot war outside of that wire, as you say?

GILBERT:  Well, actually, I’m sitting inside a bunker right now, talking to you, and this bunker is here for troops here, although we’re very far away from the edge of the camp.  It’s a huge base here, but I’m sitting inside of this because occasionally rockets come flying into this base from the outskirts of Kandahar and from outside the base.  So you feel it everywhere.  It’s a massive concrete bunker with seats in it that can seat probably about a hundred people.  And these are scattered around the base, especially close to where people would gather.  I’m on the Canadian headquarters base right now, and then near the American gym or near the cafeteria, you have these bunkers that people are supposed to run to.  So that’s probably how you feel it here.  I’ve only been for three days and haven’t experienced a rocket attack, but apparently in the last two weeks, there have been around seven rockets flying into the base, but that’s just on the base.  Outside there have been a lot of casualties in Helmand province, next door to Kandahar province in the south.  The Marines have had a very hard time here in this province.  The 82^nd Airborne has experienced a lot of casualties, and also a Striker Brigade taskforce has lost a number of troops in the last few months.  So I mean, this area is very hot right now.

WERMAN: Reporter Ben Gilbert at the military base just outside Kandahar, Afghanistan.  Thank you, Ben.

GILBERT:  Thank you, Marco.

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• BBC coverage
• Global Economy podcast
• Alex Gallafent on the Dubai crisis

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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.  The Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai today tried to reassure investors about the health of its finances, but investors didn’t buy it.  Stock markets in both Dubai and neighboring Abu Dhabi fell sharply today.  The problem, as investors see it, is Dubai World.  That’s the main investment arm of the government of Dubai.  It’s having trouble repaying billions of dollars of debt, and the emirate’s government has announced that it won’t guarantee repayment of that debt, which, no surprise, makes investors nervous.  The World’s Jason Margolis explains the global implications of this Dubai mess.

JASON MARGOLIS: In terms of major world companies, Dubai World isn’t that big a deal.  When General Motors filed for bankruptcy this year, GM’s debt was nearly three times larger than Dubai World’s.   But Dubai World is different from GM.  The emirate of Dubai owns Dubai World.  So, if Dubai World, or by extension, the emirate of Dubai, can’t meet its debt obligations, that spells wider troubles, says Christopher Davidson, a Dubai credit expert from Durham University.

CHRISTOPHER DAVIDSON: Dubai’s disaster, as it unfolds, is certainly tarnishing the rest of the region.  The rest of the region by reputation will find it difficult to refinance debt too because the cost of insuring that debt increases drastically.

MARGOLIS: Davidson says banks might also think twice before loaning money to emerging economies in other parts of the world.

DAVIDSON: Dubai has tarnished the reputations of emerging markets around the world, especially Asia.

MARGOLIS: Not that there’s anything new happening in Asian markets. In fact, Dubai’s excess could also potentially tarnish other nations that have even less to do with the emirate.

DESMOND LACHMAN: A bunch of countries like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, together with Ukraine, and Bulgaria, and Hungary.

MARGOLIS: That’s economist Desmond Lachman at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.  And Lachman says it’s not only emerging economies that might have trouble getting access to credit.

LACHMAN: If Dubai is reminding people there’s a lot of risk outstanding and if people begin to become a lot more risk averse, lenders become wary about lending to a country that has got very large imbalances.

MARGOLIS: Lachman says some western European countries like Greece, Ireland, Spain and Portugal could have trouble getting loans at reasonable rates.  The problems in Dubai pose another kind of risk to the world economy, to the world’s stock markets.  Banks in the United Kingdom are the most exposed with an estimated $50 billion in outstanding loans to the United Arab Emirates.  American, French, and German banks are all on the hook for about $10 billion each.  These loans sent investors scrambling this week, dumping shares, guessing which western banks are most exposed to risk.  Right now, and this might be sounding familiar, nobody is certain which banks are holding which bad loans.   But maybe it’s not all that bad. Of course, markets often overreact.

DOUG REDIKER: There’s the reality, then there’s the perception of the reality.

MARGOLIS: Doug Rediker is a former investment banker and is now with the Washington think tank the New America Foundation.

REDIKER: The reality there’s a problem in Dubai, there’s a problem in a specific area of Dubai.  Not area geographically, I mean Dubai World and Dubai World’s holdings, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there are problems throughout emerging markets or throughout the Gulf.

MARGOLIS: But then there’s the perception of the reality.

REDIKER: From a snapshot of a trading floor mentality, if you see “Dubai Crisis” on your screen, you could, without having a greater understanding of the nuance, assume that this a broader crisis, sell your positions in a panic and as result trigger something that really isn’t warranted.

MARGOLIS: Warranted or not, that’s what we saw investors do last week. Whether their perception of reality changes this week, that’s another story.  For the World, I’m Jason Margolis

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Jake in Tokyo-Ayano Sato. Japanese graffiti in traditional mode. Photo: Ayano Sato

Jake Adelstein reads an excerpt:

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• Book information: Tokyo Vice
• www.japansubculture.com

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman.  This is The World.  Japan’s version of the Mafia is known as the Yakuza and its activities are about what you’d expect.  The Yakuza engages in extortion, blackmail, smuggling, drugs, and gambling.  And, as Jake Adelstein learned when he was a reporter for Japan’s largest newspaper, the Yakuza is heavily involved in the sex industry and the human trafficking that feeds it.  Mr. Adelstein details the workings of Japanese organized crime in his book, “Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan.”  He’s in the studios of KUOW in Seattle.  Jake Adelstein, I want to find out more about the Yakuza in a moment, but start out by telling me how you, an American kid from Missouri, ends up on the crime beat for Japan’s biggest newspaper.

JAKE ADELSTEIN:  Well, I went to Japan in 1988 because I was very interested in Japanese culture and I was very lucky to quickly find lodgings in a Zen Buddhist temple in the sort of suburbs of Tokyo.  And that gave me the cultural immersion thing going on there.  And as I was about to graduate in 1992, I decided that I would try and take the newspaper examinations so that I could test my Japanese ability.  Newspapers in Japan, and there are five major ones, have a yearly test, which are kind of like the SATs for journalists.  Usually college students take them, and if your scores are good enough, you go onto a series of interviews.  And if you pass the interviews, you get hired.  It’s highly competitive.

WERMAN:  Right.  It’s not like in the United States where you work a small newspaper in a small market and eventually, with luck, you work your way up to the New York Times or the Washington Post.

ADELSTEIN:  No, no, no, no. You get a shot at the big leagues, right from the beginning.  However, while you may be entering a big company, you’re immediately going to be sent out to the boonies, or the New Jersey of Japan to do your stint in the countryside before you can come up and play in the big leagues.

WERMAN:  Now you got into the underworld of Japan very quickly after becoming a crime reporter.  And on the so-called “good” side of things, you spent a lot of time hanging out with the police in order to cultivate them as sources.

ADELSTEIN:  Yes.  You know, sometimes Japanese police reporters are referred to “male geisha,” “otoko geisha” because so much of your job appears to be wining and dining and schmoozing with the cops in the hope that they’ll leak you some kind of detail or story, so that you can get a scoop on the competition.

WERMAN:  And just how much time are you spending with the police officers?

ADELSTEIN:  It becomes all consuming.  When you’re on the police beat, there’s really not any days off.  Usually, typically, I would get done with work 7:00 or 8:00.  Then I would go out drinking with some cops, or maybe go to their houses, then come back and check the newspaper, to see all the headlines and everything were good, about 2:00 in the morning.  Then I’d get up at 5:30 in the morning and try and catch police officers before they were going to work to see what was going to happen for the evening edition of the paper, since we had a morning and evening edition.  All my time was consumed, spent with cops or criminals, or people in between.

WERMAN:  And buying gifts for them as well.  Did you have a family at the time?  You had just come out of college.  Would you have a family or girlfriend who might have been upset by this amount of time you were spending with the cops?

ADELSTEIN:  Oh yes, my college girlfriend basically dumped me when we were in the middle of making out and I had to leave to go cover a murder, with the ultimatum, “If you leave now, you’ll never see me again,” and that was true.  I said, “Gotta go.  Gotta go to this murder scene,” and when I came back, she’d actually cleaned up the apartment and left me a very nice note, like; “I never want to see you again.”  But at least she cleaned the apartment.

WERMAN:  So the cops were among some of your better sources.  Your reporting also took you into the Japanese underworld, especially the sex industry.  In Kabukicho, this is the red light district, you provide a pretty, no-nonsense, vivid description of the place.  At one point, you go to what you call a no-panty, shabu shabu restaurant.  It’s where they cook soup and stuff, where half nude young women prepare beef dishes at your table and flirted with you while you ate.  And this is just a restaurant. What is the rest of the place like?

ADELSTEIN:  The Japanese sex industry is very, very legal.  Essentially, it works like this: anything besides actual sexual intercourse is permitted.  That leaves a variety of possibilities, and because actual intercourse is forbidden, according to the law, they spice up the menu with very strange things like girls in schoolgirl outfits or nun outfits.  There’s a place to cater to every particular whim you might have.  There was an infamous place called “Child” in which men would go in and have their genitalia shaved and diapered, and then all the women there were lactating.  The police busted them for sanitation violations because they weren’t keeping the bottled milk, mothers’ milk, in the right refrigerator kind of containers.  That’s one of the more bizarre ones.  There are clubs that are designed to look like the insides of subway cars, where you can pretend to molest a woman while she’s commuting to work.  Or you can pay money and have a woman molest you while you’re commuting to work.  And they have an actual subway car built inside the shop.

WERMAN:  And just how mainstream is this stuff?  How mainstream are the people who visit these clubs?

ADELSTEIN:  This would happen now and then: a couple of my colleagues on the newspaper would want to go out to one of these sexual massage places.  And I could never go, because they don’t accept foreigners, not that I was particularly upset about that.  But it’s very common.  The Japanese attitude towards sex and marriage is very different from what we have here.  Essentially, traditionally, it’s not considered infidelity if the man is paying for it and he’s careful.

WERMAN:  That’s extraordinary.  Now immediately, you are brought into the circle and start to cover the Japanese mafia.  That’s presumably part of the cop beat when you’re working for a newspaper in Tokyo.  Is the Yakuza like the mafia, with different families, each with a different turf and a different collection of extortion businesses?

ADELSTEIN:  The Yakuza in Japan are very interesting.  The very first time I ever met a Yakuza, I actually went to the guy’s office.  I mean, he had an office and a business card.  It wasn’t hidden at all.  In Japan, they have fan magazines.  If I wanted to know who’s running the Yamaguchi-gumi, which is the largest group with 40,000 members, I’ll just go to the newsstand, you know, pick up this month’s copy of Jitsuwa Jidai and it’ll tell me the latest personnel changes, probably with photos.

WERMAN:  Now your book focuses on one major Yakuza player, Mr. Goto, and a strange tale of how he came to the United States to get a liver transplant.  And effectively, that story that you’ve told essentially ended your newspaper career.  It’s a complicated story, but tell us what happened.

ADELSTEIN:  First of all, I should say that Goto Tadamasa is probably one of the most– was one of the richest and most powerful Yakuza in Japan.  But here’s the story.  I heard that Goto Tadamasa had come to the United States and gotten a liver transplant in the year 2001.  I thought it was an incredible story, because this man was so infamous and so definitely blacklisted by the United States.  I couldn’t figure out any way that he could have gotten into the United States.  So while I was working on that story and gathering all the facts, it leaked out to the Goto-gumi and by March of 2008, I was under police protection, and the police were telling me, if you want to deal with this guy, you need to write up everything you know about his liver transplant and that will neutralize him.  And that’s what I did.  Except I couldn’t get a Japanese periodical to write the story, so I ended up writing it for the Washington Post.

WERMAN:  Among these Yakuza, vengeance is valued and justice is theirs.  So you’ve published this book now.  Does it put you in danger?

ADELSTEIN:  Well, there was a political calculation done before I published this book, or even before I wrote the Washington Post story, is that Goto has been seen as a troublemaker by people in his own organization. And the Yamaguchi-gumi is like 40,000 people.  He is one faction.  So I approached another faction and I showed them essentially what I was about to write and I asked them for a comment.  They didn’t give me a commentary, but they did try to bribe me to not write this story.  But essentially, I was able to play one Yakuza faction against another and they kicked him out of the Yamaguchi-gumi in October of 2008, and then I felt much safer.  There’s only one other organized crime group that’s still slightly angry with me.  I’m working out an apology to those guys.

WERMAN:  Jake Adelstein, author of “Tokyo Vice,” thanks very much for your time.

ADELSTEIN:  Thank you.

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• More about Paganini

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MARCO WERMAN: Britain confirmed today that it’s sending more troops to Afghanistan.   Gordon Brown made the announcement.  The World’s Laura Lynch reports that the British Prime Minister may well have previewed parts of the speech President Obama will give tomorrow.

LAURA LYNCH: Gordon Brown delivered his news in Parliament today.  The Prime Minister said Britain will send another 500 troops to Afghanistan.

PM GORDON BROWN: I can confirm that we will move to a new force level of nine and a half thousand. The extra troops will deploy in early December to thicken the UK troop presence in central Helmand.

LYNCH: Five hundred additional soldiers aren’t much compared with the 33,000 reinforcements that some expect President Obama to send to Afghanistan.  But Britain already has the second largest contingent in the country.  And Brown has to sell the British public on the reasons for sending even more soldiers into what has become an unpopular mission.

BROWN: Some ask why British troops are in Afghanistan at all.  If al Qaida can organize in Britain, in Somalia, in Yemen, in other places and even in internet chat rooms in every part of the world.  But as long as the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas are the location of choice for al Qaida and are the epicenter of global terrorism, it is the government’s judgment that we must address the terrorist threat at its source.

LYNCH: You may well hear an echo of those words tomorrow from President Obama.  Michael Clarke is the director of research at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies.  He says both leaders believe the time has come to implement the strategy of America’s top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal.

MICHAEL CLARKE: I think this week is the “let’s get on with it week.”  Nobody disagrees on the basic strategy.  Nobody disagrees that the McChrystal plan is essentially the only way forward. There is something to be hoped for in this week. The situation on ground in Afghanistan is not particularly good, but the consensus for action, the consensus to stop talking about it and get on with it, is now, I think, really quite strong.

LYNCH: Still, there was more evidence today of that consensus.  Brown said eight other nations are committing more troops to the operation.  British officials put the number of soldiers at about 5,000.  Colonel Richard Kemp is a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan.  Kemp says the numbers are important but not as important as getting the troops there rapidly.

COL.  RICHARD KEMP: This is all about speed, which is why the delay in deploying these troops, the delay in deploying American forces in large numbers, that has taken several months to decide to do, that works against our objectives in Afghanistan in a way.

LYNCH: Other problems remain.  Even if other nations are ready to send more troops, they may not be willing to move their soldiers into the more volatile areas in the south.  After all, the Canadians and the Dutch are making plans to pull out of the region.  And then, there’s Pakistan.

Prime Minister Brown may be providing another hint of the White House strategy yesterday when he publicly presses Pakistan to go after al Qaida.

BROWN:  Eight years after 2001, people are gonna ask why is Osama bin Laden never been near to being caught. We believe he’s in Pakistan.  Why is Zawahiri, who is the number two in control, never been caught and what can the Pakistan authorities do that is far more effective to help us make sure that the al Qaida threat is dealt with in Pakistan itself?

LYNCH: Brown’s criticism hasn’t gone over well with Pakistan’s leaders.  The interior minister Rehman Malik says it’s up to NATO and US forces to ensure the border with Afghanistan is secure.

REHMAN MALIK: No, the main thing west has to do is seal the border from that side. You know there are NATO force, US forces and Afghan forces and still you can see with the naked eyes the ammunition coming.  No, these terrorists have their rocket launchers, anti aircraft guns, land mines, name anything, they have it, which only a state can have it.  And if these groups or these terrorists are having it through Afghanistan then it is for Afghanistan and the allied forces to see as to who is the supplier.

LYNCH: Malik adds that if Gordon Brown has any fresh information about where bin Laden is, Pakistan would like to see it.  After all, he says, Pakistani intelligence suggests he’s no longer within Pakistan’s borders.  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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MARCO WERMAN: We may not know where bin Laden is, but we know where he was.  In December, 2001, he led about a thousand fighters of al Qaida in a battle in the mountains of Tora Bora.  But bin Laden escaped to Pakistan.  So, apparently did his deputy and the leader of the Afghan Taliban.  A new report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee revisits that crucial moment in the war.  The chief investigator for the committee’s Democratic staff prepared the study.  He is Douglas Frantz, and he’s in Washington.  Doug Frantz, you have spent a lot of time on the trail of Osama bin Laden.  Walk us through what you discovered about the Tora Bora battle back in 2001.

DOUGLAS FRANTZ:  Sure, I’m glad to, Marco, and thanks very much for having me on.  I think it’s quite clear, and this report isn’t the first place where this conclusion has been reached, that the United States military commanders and the Defense Secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, wanted to have a very light footprint in Afghanistan.  They didn’t want to stir up what they worried would be a protracted insurgency.  And so they had fewer than a hundred American soldiers camped out around the base of the Tora Bora mountains, and they relied on very unreliable Afghan militias and Pakistani soldiers who really never showed up to go after bin Laden, and to block any exit that he had.

WERMAN:  Right.  And in this report, what conclusions do you draw as to what could have been done to capture or kill Osama bin Laden?

FRANTZ:  I think what’s significant here in this report is that we gather together a lot of different sources including, most significantly for me, Marco, is a 2007 official history put together by the United States Special Operations Command down in Florida, which oversees the Green Berets and the Delta Force and the Navy Seals and the Marine Special Ops.  And they were very instrumental in all of that early Afghan war prosecution.  And in their history, the Special Ops commanders make it very clear that Osama bin Laden was in fact at Tora Bora in early to mid December of 2001, and that the United States did not commit the number of troops necessary to get him while he was within our grasp.

WERMAN:  Right, that’s one view of history, General Tommy Franks, the former US commander, has questioned whether Osama bin Laden was still in Tora Bora in the winter of 2001.  What specific evidence did this command in Florida actually come up with that shows that bin Laden was still there?

FRANTZ:  Well, I think there are two versions of the history put together by the Special Ops command.  One is a classified version which goes more deeply into the reporting on the scene.  But even the unclassified version makes it clear, and there’s a critical quote in that unclassified version which says, “All sources corroborated bin Laden’s presence at Tora Bora.”  That’s all sources corroborated it.  I think honestly that Tommy Franks was mistaken in 2004 particularly, when he said that the intelligence didn’t prove that bin Laden was at Tora Bora.

WERMAN:  How is it that more troops on the ground in 2001 would have been successful at capturing or killing him?

FRANTZ:  If Osama bin Laden had been captured or killed, we would not face the enflamed insurgency that is threatening the government of Pakistan.  We wouldn’t have as powerful a Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.  I think that eliminating Osama bin Laden from the battlefield, while it would not have eradicated the worldwide extremist threat, would have weakened al Qaida dramatically.

WERMAN:  Well, hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.  Tell me, what is the relevance of this now?  How do you think this report relates to the current debate over whether to send more troops to Afghanistan?

FRANTZ:  It’s relevant in a couple of ways, Marco.  One, we need to understand where we’ve been and who we’re fighting as we go forward if, as is expected, the President sends 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan in the coming months.  We need to know better who we’re fighting and how we got there, and we need to make sure that the mistakes, like the mistake we made at Tora Bora, are not repeated.  I think those are two strong lessons going forward.

WERMAN:  Doug Frantz is the chief investigator for the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  Thank you very much.

FRANTZ:  Thanks a lot, Marco.

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MARCO WERMAN: Yet more evidence the world of global finance is on shaky ground comes to us from Paris.  The prestigious French fashion house Christian Lacroix is facing bankruptcy, and a deadline for buyers to deposit checks that would spare it that fate passed this past weekend.

Hilary Alexander is the fashion director for the Daily Telegraph newspaper in London.  And Hilary, we just heard a report about Dubai’s financial woes, and this may be related.  The front runner to buy Christian Lacroix was until recently a sheikh from the United Arab Emirates too.  What can you tell us about that?

HILARY ALEXANDER:  Well, all I know is that it was one of the rumors that was spinning around Paris in the wake of Lacroix’s last and very emotional haute couture show in July.  And of course, everyone was hoping that a fairy godfather would arrive, gallop in on a white steed and rescue him, but it appears, for the moment at least, that that is not going to happen.

WERMAN: And was this Christian Lacroix’s last best hope?

ALEXANDER:  It would seem so for the moment.  He’s not been in a terribly good financial position for a couple of years.  He’s a very, very flamboyant designer and although he had in the past customers such as Nicole Kidman, Madonna, even Diana, Princess of Wales when she was alive, he seemed never really to reach the great heights of some of the other big luxury brands, such as Dior, for example, or Gauthier or Chanel.

WERMAN: Christian Lacroix was kind of a driving force in 1980s fashion in particular.  Why was his last fashion show so emotional?

ALEXANDER:  His last show was very emotional because a lot of his friends, relatives, his wife, clients, all turned up.  People were just openly crying.  The famous embroiderer, Lesage, was in tears.  All the staff were in tears, because of course they’ve worked with him for 20 years, and nobody, I think, could quite believe that this really was going to be the last we would see of Christian Lacroix.

WERMAN:  Of course, we don’t know if it is the last yet, but the fact that Christian Lacroix and his house were looking for a savior somewhere in the United Arab Emirates maybe shows the desperation that they face.  How important has new money from places like Dubai and the United Arab Emirates been to the fashion industry in recent years?

ALEXANDER:  Well, I would say in the last sort of 15 years, ten to 15 years, the Middle Eastern customer and then more recently the Russian, Chinese and Indian clients have become extremely important to most of the big couture houses, because they tend to have the ready money and they order large.

WERMAN: You know, people losing their jobs here in this country, around the world, are not likely to shed many tears for the decline of an expensive fashion house like Christian Lacroix.  Have you noticed changes in the way people who read your newspaper, for example, the Daily Telegraph, the way they perceive the fashion industry?  Is it any different since the financial crisis hit last year?

ALEXANDER:  Not really.  In fact, it seems to be quite the contrary.  As I’m walking around the traditional shopping areas, the stores are absolutely packed and people seem to be spending. I think people feel the need for a little bit of retail therapy.

WERMAN:  If they’re not buying haute couture, what are the haute couturiers going to do?

ALEXANDER: Well, traditionally, the haute couture business does not really survive purely on its clients alone, who may in some cases number a few dozen.  The haute couture business is a kind of  wonderful shimmering fairytale flagship that provides much needed publicity for all the other products that the brand sells, such as perfumes, scarves and of course handbags, which in many cases account for 50 percent of the income of a brand.

WERMAN:  Well, apparently not enough retail therapy right now to bail out the sinking house of Lacroix.

ALEXANDER:  I know.  We will miss him, because he was a sort of slightly madcap Bohemian who obeyed only his own rules of dress and that was quite refreshing.

WERMAN:  Hilary Alexander, the fashion director for the Daily Telegraph newspaper in London, thanks very much.

ALEXANDER:  Thank you, Marco.

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MARCO WERMAN: An elderly Ukrainian-American man appeared in court today in Munich.  It was the first day of what is likely to be Germany’s last big Nazi-era trial.  John Demjanjuk is alleged to have been part of the Nazi drive to exterminate Europe’s Jews.  He denies the charges.  The BBC’s Steve Rosenberg reports from Munich.

STEVE ROSENBERG: He’s accused of mass murder, but today John Demjanjuk couldn’t even walk into the courtroom. Groaning, his eyes tightly shut, his body covered in a blue blanket,  89-year-old John Demjanjuk was wheeled into his trial. As photographers crowded around the wheelchair it felt more like a freak show than a Nazi war crimes trial. And watching him in the gallery, in stunned silence, the relatives of some of the 27,900 victims Mr. Demjanjuk allegedly herded into the gas chambers of Sobibor. His defense team says he’s too old and too ill to be prosecuted. The court believes that John Demjanjuk is fit enough to stand trial. Watching the proceedings today was Efraim Zuroff from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

EFRAIM ZUROFF:  Well, listen, I just hope that the continuation will not be like the first day, when the whole world will learn more details about Demjanjuk’s health than about the crimes at Sobibor.  So this is of course the danger.  This is the problem and listen, this is the challenge really of the judge and the challenge to the court, to make sure that this trial doesn’t get derailed.

ROSENBERG: John Demjanjuk is accused of being a guard in Sobibor, but what was interesting about this first day of his trial was that his defense didn’t deny that. Their argument was that it was unjust to prosecute someone who only followed orders, when some of the principal perpetrators of the death camp, who’d issued those orders, had been tried and acquitted by German courts after the war.

WERMAN:  The BBC’s Steve Rosenberg filed that report from Munich.

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.

MARCO WERMAN: In other news from that part of the world, the voters of Switzerland have spoken, and Muslim leaders around the world are speaking back.  The Swiss voted yesterday to ban the building of minarets in their country.  Today, one of Indonesia’s main Muslim leaders called the vote a sign of hate and intolerance toward Islam.  And Egypt’s Grand Mufti described it as an insult to the feelings of the Muslim community in Switzerland and elsewhere.  Nevertheless, 57 per cent of Swiss voters approved the ban.  The World’s religion editor, Jane Little, has details.

JILL LITTLE:  It was a provocative campaign led by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, and it paid off.  The campaign featured posters of a woman clad in a black burqa in front of a Swiss flag covered in minarets resembling missiles.  The posters called on the Swiss to vote “yes” against minarets, and most, like this man, did.

MAN 1:  [speaking German] I think that we wouldn’t be allowed to build our steeples in the Islamic world and I think that’s the reason that we won’t allow the excesses of Islam here. I think it’s good.

LITTLE: Many in cosmopolitan Geneva were surprised and dismayed by the vote.

MAN 2:  I was actually quite disgusted by the result.  I think it’s against the fundamental values of freedom of speech and I’m actually quite ashamed to be Swiss this morning.

LITTLE: But most voters appear to have agreed with the Swiss People’s Party, that the minarets, towers that call Muslims to prayer, are not just religious symbols but signs of a growing, muscular Islam.

ULRICH SCHLUEER: [speaking German]

LITTLE: Ulrich Schlueer, an MP for the party, says Swiss people regard the minaret as a symbol of an aggressive attitude against integration and for the imposition of Muslim values. There are in fact only four minarets in Switzerland, serving a population of some 350,000 Muslims. Most of them come from the former Yugoslavia. Many had seen their mosques bulldozed during the war in Bosnia and wanted more than the unofficial prayer rooms they currently have.  This vote means they can keep the existing minarets but can’t build more.  Elham Manea, a founder of the Forum for Progressive Islam, says this vote could backfire.

ELHAM MANEA: My fear is basically that the younger generation will be feeling unwelcomed and that could also leave the ground open for other extremist Islamist groups who are waiting for such frustration to exploit.

LITTLE: The government, which urged people to vote against the ban, says it will respect the outcome. But ministers and business leaders worry that the vote could harm important trade relations. Muslim leaders from Indonesia to Egypt have already condemned the ban as an insult to Muslims.  Still, it represents a growing fear within Europe of a rising Islam, and its perceived threat to European values. Tariq Ramadan, who was born in Switzerland, is the president of the European Muslim Network, based in Brussels.

TARIQ RAMADAN: In the UK we speak about violence and we speak about Islam, connecting Islam and violence. In France, headscarves.  So in every single European country you have a visible symbol that is used to spread around controversies against the Muslims and this is what Muslims should understand, that behind this symbol there are very deep questions and fears that we have to take seriously.

LITTLE: Right-wing parties in the Netherlands and Denmark have welcomed the Swiss vote and say they’d like to mount similar referenda in their own countries.   But it’s not clear the Swiss ban will hold.  The case may now go to the European Court of Human Rights.   For The World, this is Jane Little.

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.