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The Current Transcript for June 13, 2018

Host: Connie Walker

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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Trailer: Featuring President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un in a meeting to remake history. One moment, one choice, what if?

CONNIE WALKER: Not coming soon to a theater near you. That's part of the White House released movie trailer, shown in an exclusive screening this week to none other than Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader. The trailer for a movie that doesn't actually exist, was meant to nudge the dictator into getting on the right side of history and getting rid of his nukes. And the other star of that show is U.S. President, Donald J. Trump, in front of the cameras after the fact, the author of "The Art of the Deal" was quick to assure the world that he's well on his way to negotiating another great one, but that remains to be seen. We'll have a couple of different takes on just what went down in Singapore this week, first up today. Then.

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Ex-detainee of Syrian prison speaking in Arabic.

CW: He's a former prisoner in one of the most notorious prisons in Syria and he's not just recounting his time there. He's doing a critical part in recreating that prison, cell by cell, wall by wall for a unique new initiative called, Forensic Architecture. I'll speak with one of the architects behind the group in half an hour. Plus, Canadian dairy, so delicious the U.S. president just can't help himself from coming back to it again and again.

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VOICE: Canada where we have tremendous tariffs, dairy as an example, 270 per cent, nobody knows that. We pay nothing, we don't want to be anything. Why should we pay?

CW: I'll speak with a Wisconsin farmer who had to sell off his dairy herd, but he says Canadian trade policy isn't the reason behind it. We're wading into the dairy wars in an hour. I'm Connie Walker sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current.

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Mock movie trailer starring Trump and Kim resembles North Korean propaganda, says historian

Guests: Mickey Bergman, Bradley K. Martin

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VOICE: Over my lifetime I've done a lot of deals with a lot of people and sometimes the people that you most distrust turn out to be the most honourable ones and the people that you do trust, they are not the honourable ones. I think that he really wants to do a great job for North Korea. I think he wants to denuke.

CW: After his time this week behind closed doors with the leader of North Korea, U.S. President Donald Trump sounds convinced. He's optimistic there's a willingness for Kim Jong-un to commit to the big objective of denuclearization. For many experts on the Korean peninsula, the optimism is not contagious. In fact, some fear that what happened in Singapore this week could have set the world on a more dangerous path. We're going to hear about those concerns in a few minutes. But first we're starting with someone who has experience negotiating with North Korea and he says this week's developments are positive first steps. Mickey Bergman was part of the negotiating team that helped obtain the release of the American student, Otto Warmbier, who was imprisoned in North Korea in 2016 and died after returning to the U.S. in a coma. Mickey Bergman is Vice President of the Center for Global Engagement and we've reached him in Arlington, Virginia. Good morning.

MICKEY BERGMAN: Good morning, Connie.

CW: So there's been a lot of mixed reaction to this week's meeting between these two leaders, what do you think was accomplished?

MB: Well I think the first thing I think that the personal relations between Trump and Kim Jong-un is a positive thing, even if it just gets us into deescalate a little bit on the tensions that we've had over the first couple of years. As you mentioned, there's a lot of skepticism around about the direction this is going. I share that skepticism because I believe that there's a mismatch between what Donald Trump believes he signed and what North Koreans believe they signed.

CW: Interesting. How do you mean?

MB: I believe that the North Korean proposition that is on the table, actually has not changed over the last several years or two decades almost. It's the same as it has always been, they haven't moved an inch. The reason why I'm a little bit optimistic is because I think that what they have on the table is good enough for us to advance. So my optimism is not because I think Donald Trump is able to move them, but I just think the deal that they're putting on the table is good or better than what we have currently in reality.

CW: So walk us through exactly what was agreed to or what wasn't agreed to regarding denuclearization.

MB: So I think if we take all the theatrics and the movie trailer you just played away and the roller coaster of emotions that is really Donald Trump's strategy, a way of life I should say it, what we're left with from the summit is three basic things: number one, we have this joint statement that is an aspirational one, talking about the futuristic and denuclearization of the peninsula. It has no legs, no methods, no implementation, no timeframe, nothing, no mechanisms. But it establishes a certain tone. Number two, it's the substance part. We see the beginning of negotiations. That's where Donald Trump will call it denuclearization, but in fact, these negotiations are going to have first, a freeze for freeze agreement, which is kind of on the table already, which means that the North Koreans will stop or freeze on on their testing and develop a proliferation of nuclear and ballistic missiles, in return for the U.S. adjusting military exercises that Trump kind of already conceded. Those negotiations will, if we're good, if we're successful and it's a big if, can lead to a more permanent agreement in which the North Koreans actually dismantle their facilities that will prevent them from doing further development and further testing. But and that's a huge but, they will not disarm their existing stockpiles. We need to we need to understand that.

CW: So the Americans and the North Koreans have different ideas about what the term denuclearization actually means.

MB: Absolutely.

CW: So you mentioned the trailer, the movie trailer that was played, I'd like to play you a clip of that. It depicts President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un as heroes in all this. Let's just listen.

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TRAILER: Destiny Pictures presents a story of opportunity, a new story, a new beginning, one of peace. Two men. Two leaders. A story about a special moment in time, when a man is presented with one chance that may never be repeated. What will he choose? To show vision and leadership or not?

CW: We're going to put that video up on our website for anyone who hasn't had a chance to see it. President Trump said he played that video to Kim Jong-un before their meeting and that the North Korean leader liked it. What do you make of the video?

MB: I'm just listening to the soundtrack. I'm feeling the same embarrassment that I felt yesterday when I saw it online. First of all, it demonstrates Trump's deep, deep, deep misunderstanding of the North Korean people and their leader. He comes from a capitalistic mindset. He does not understand that one of the proudest elements of the North Korean society and when I talk about the North Korean society, I talk about the elite, so it's the military and political families, it's about 10 per cent of the population. From their perspective, they are the last surviving true socialist experiment. They outlasted the Soviet Union, they outlasted China as it reformed, they outlasted Cuba as it reformed, it's their proud moment. Donald Trump is confusing carrots and sticks here. He thinks he's offering a carrot, but if Kim Jong-un actually gets what Trump is offering him, it might be the end of the Kim Jong-Un dynasty. And so it's embarrassing from that perspective, it's also embarrassing that you could see from the movie, that it's not only about Kim Jong-un. It's about Donald Trump being the leader and the voice of peace.

CW: So you've spent a lot of time dealing with North Koreans. You obviously have this insight. How do you think they viewed this meeting?

MB: I think for North Koreans this meeting was a huge success from the lead up to the meeting and for the meeting itself and just a couple of examples of why. The lead up to the meeting, their leader that used to be this isolated guy who's really never left the country much since assuming power, has since then been accepted by the Chinese premier twice, by the South Koreans of course, for the summit the Russian prime minister flew into Pyongyang to talk to him. Suddenly he is a celebrity, I mean we saw the little night stroll he took in Singapore with all the screaming and yelling, but not only that, he's seen as the peace seeker. And when he sits with the president of the United States toe-to-toe in that meeting, he is elevated to that level and that's something that that was leading up to the summit and the summit itself. And then you ask at what price? Well, at no price at all. The key word in the document that they signed, the two leaders, is reaffirm. I should say the two key letters is re, which means reaffirms, which means that he has not said anything new. He has not committed to anything new in this. So from the North Koreans' perspective this was a huge win in terms of legitimacy and in terms of standing. And then if you listen to what the North Korean media agencies is interpreting there, the summit after the fact, in local media there they said yeah Donald Trump also in private, agreed to remove the sanctions.

CW: Well, I mean you consider this meeting as a positive first step. What steps will you be looking for in the weeks to come to see whether or not real progress will actually be made.

MB: Yeah. So I do say and I know it sounds like I'm contradicting myself, I do see this as a positive step, again not because I think that Donald Trump is able to move the North Koreans, but because I believe that if you take into account who the North Koreans are, their way of thinking and I see them as brutally rational people in leadership and I think that this path that we started can, if it leads the U.S. and the U.S. president to sign an agreement that under the terms that I've just outlined before earlier in this interview, I think this will be a really, really good deal for us to move. And it's not everything we want, we want to have, but it's certainly a good enough deal. Next steps, we have to get the negotiations going and the leaders and that's my biggest fear, have to stay engaged. That personal relationship, whether we like it or not, is something that is critical for those negotiations and one of my worries. If you think about it, both leaders got what what they wanted as individuals, they got what they wanted out of it. I'm afraid that they can mark it as a victory and move on. And if that's the case, we're inevitably going to go into a crisis very soon. And all of this is going to blow up.

CW: We'll have to leave it there. Thank you very much for joining us, Mickey.

MB: Thank you Connie.

CW: Mickey Bergman is Vice President of the Richardson Center for Global Engagement. He was in Arlington, Virginia. There may not have been a major deal struck between the two leaders this week, but President Trump did offer this to North Korea.

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VOICE: We will be stopping the war games, which will save us a tremendous amount of money, unless and until we see that the future negotiation is not going along like it should, but we'll be saving a tremendous amount of money. Plus, I think it's very provocative.

CW: Those so-called war games are joint exercises carried out each year by the United States and South Korean military. They've been consistently cited by North Korea as a provocation and a reason it needs to build a nuclear arsenal, but our next guest has concerns over axing these exercises. Bradley K. Martin is a long-time North Korean watcher, a journalist and a historian. He's also the author of "Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim dynasty, a history" and of the newly published North Korea-set novel, "Nuclear Blues." We've reached Bradley K. Martin in Atlanta. Good morning.

BRADLEY MARTIN: Good morning Connie.

CW: So Bradley what have you been thinking while you're watching the summit and the events since?

BM: Well of course I want to be optimistic, we all do. We want to think, oh finally this is all going to be over, but I'm afraid I'm concerned about well starting with the fact that what we have here is two deciders who are very much self-interested people, perhaps the two most self-interested people in the world. So how do we ensure that what they agree to, which may be in their interests, is in the interests of the rest of us. And we see this first with Trump, just basically throwing out this this free offer, OK we'll stop the exercises and calling them provocative, which is what the North Koreans have always done well. This blindsided the South Korean government, our ally. So what we see here is a one man show, that's the way I guess Trump's fans like him operate, but personally I find it troubling and worrisome and I wonder where we're going.

CW: What about his pledge to end the joint military exercises concerns you?

BM: Well he didn't consult with South Korea, for one thing. Now this is just typical of how he's been behaving lately. I mean you saw it with Canada with the way he basically dissed the alliance and treated your your prime minister badly the other day. He is a person who has little respect for our long established alliances. He believes in shaking things up, so he would prefer to get something new going with the likes of Putin or Xi or Kim Jong-un. I'm afraid that's a matter of character and I don't see enough forces in the White House and then the government now to to slow him down sufficiently, I'm afraid.

CW: How vulnerable is South Korea if these war games end?

BM: Well OK, it won't add to immediate vulnerability, but essentially your previous guest said that the North Korean playbook never changes, that is true and North Korea has always wanted exactly the same thing. They want the United States South Korean alliance to be dissolved. They want to get the American troops out of South Korea and they want a peace treaty. Why do they want this? Because we have been deterring a North Korean attack on South Korea for all of these decades with the presence of our troops. They are a tripwire. If North Korea attacks South Korea again, many Americans will be killed. They are forward deployed up north of Seoul. They will be killed, the United States will automatically be at war and then that's the way it will come down. The North Koreans in 1950, when they invaded South Korea, hoped that the United States would not come to South Korea's rescue. And they believed that it would not, but they were wrong. Very quickly American troops came from Japan and started fighting and gradually helped turn the tide against the North Korean invasion. The North Koreans ever since, have hoped to get rid of that alliance in case they want to come and invade again and they don't. Invasion is not their first choice of how to take over South Korea, they'd rather do it through political means by forming some kind of confederation and dominating it with their single mindedness as opposed to the diversity of the South Korean democratic society.

CW: So if that's their end game, how much did this summit help them in accomplishing that goal?

BM: Well, it has certainly gotten the process rolling. I mean that's the first thing Trump offered to do was to stop the exercises. OK, if you stop the exercises, if you acknowledge that they are provocative then what are the two country's militaries going to do to keep up the deterrent. They need to work together if they're going to have a true alliance. So this is seems to me premature. North Korea has given away nothing and Trump has already said, oh yeah what you've been asking for all these decades, I'm going to give it to you.

CW: How much do you think Donald Trump actually understands about Kim Jong-un's motivation here?

BM: I don't know whether he really cares. I think he wants to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

CW: So you heard the clip of the video that President Trump played for Kim Jong un. What impact would a video like that have on on the North Korean leader?

BM: Well he probably appreciated it in terms of showmanship because it's precisely the sort of thing that his own people would put together with. It looked like a piece of North Korean propaganda. It even included North Korean propaganda scenes like the huge, the mass games they have, the huge show in a stadium with people flipping cards and doing acrobatics out on the field that they do to show their single mindedness as a people. So he was probably pretty happy with the overall thrust of it. I don't think the film actually said anything about real estate investment, but that would be a touchy area if Trump actually spoke about this and said, hey I'd love to come up to your country and do some investing in real estate. Because that's one of the major fears of North Korean elite is that once any sort of reunification comes, South Koreans are going to come up buy up all their property and they're going to be the lower rung of the ladder.

CW: They may not have spoken about it in the meeting, but he did, Donald Trump did speak about in the press conference just that, you know what incredible beaches they have and how you know.

BM: That would not be welcome to a person thinking in North Korean terms. But overall I would say that the video probably was very pleasing and the North Koreans will probably use it for propaganda for their own purposes.

CW: OK, so one quick last question, do you think that we're going to see denuclearization of North Korea?

BM: Boy, I sure hope so, but I don't know that it can happen with Trump in charge and with Kim in charge.

CW: Alright. Sorry, we'll have to leave it there. Thank you very much for joining us Bradley.

BM: Thank you Connie.

CW: Bradley K. Martin is a long time expert on North Korea and the author of the North Korea-set novel, "Nuclear Blues." We reached him in Atlanta. To see the full video that President Trump played to the North Korean leader, head to our website at cbc.ca/thecurrent. The CBC News is next. Then, think of them as Architects Without Borders. I'll speak with Christina Varvia of the group Forensic Architecture, in our next half hour. I'm Connie Walker, sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti, and you're listening to The Current.

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'Ear-witness testimony': Detainees' memories used to map out a notorious Syrian prison

Guest: Christina Varvia

CW: Hello. I'm Connie Walker, sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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CW: Still to come, times are tough for some U.S. dairy farmers and Donald Trump is pretty sure the reason is Canadian dairy tariffs. In half an hour, I'll speak with a Wisconsin farmer who had to sell off his herd, but doesn't think Canadian trade policy has much to do with it. But first, creating blueprints of dark sites.

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VOICE: In Saydnaya, silence is the master. You cannot speak loudly. Your voice should always be low. This enables you to hear everything. You try, you try to build an image based on the sounds you hear. You probably know the person by his footsteps. You can tell the food times by the sound of the bowl. Your hearing, it becomes very, very strong because you are relying on it. You lose all your other senses.

Salam Othman is a former detainee at one of Syria's most notorious prisons, Saydnaya. You heard him bearing witness to his time in the prison there, but you might be surprised just who he's opening up to, an architect and a sound artist, recording his words for a unique project called Forensic Architecture. They're using his testimony to create an interactive model of a place no outsider has had access to since the beginning of the war in Syria. Since prisoners in Saydnaya are kept largely in the dark and in silence, the former prisoners memories of sound may have become critical recollections of what researchers call ear witness testimony. And a warning some of that testimony we're about to hear describes torture in Saydnaya.

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VOICE: When you are sitting in a solitary cell, you always hear noise. You can hear the humming of the truck when there are new prisoners arriving. Then the same thing that happened to us. The welcome party happens to the newcomers. And in Saydnaya, if you hear screaming, you know, you know they are newcomers. When there is no screaming, we know they are accustomed to Saydnaya. In Sednaya if you scream, the beatings are worse. If you say nothing, they lessen until they stop. One important sound is the one coming from beyond the wall, the sound of beating. Once you hear the sound of beating you concentrate on that sound, to hear whether the beating will be repeated in many places or just in the one room. If the beating in one cell is repeated in another cell, you know that your turn is coming. I can tell if they are beating with tank belts or sticks or the Lakhdar Brahimi broomsticks. I can tell if they are punching or kicking or hitting them against the wall. I can tell the difference by the sound of screaming or the sound of the tools hitting the body. We would when a prisoner can't even scream or loses consciousness.

CW: The Saydnaya prison reconstruction is part of an investigation led by Amnesty International and it's one example of what Forensic Architecture does. They're also using their expertise in other investigations, such as the one into last year's Grenfell Tower disaster in London, England that claimed the lives of 72 people. But we start today on the outskirts of Damascus with the architect who led the Saydnaya prison project. Christina Varvia is the Deputy Director of Forensic Architecture and she joins us from London, England. Hello.

CHRISTINA VARVIA: Hi.

CW: Christina those memories are harrowing. When you listen to that kind of description, what exactly are you listening for? What are the details that you're picking out?

CV: So the research that we conducted with Amnesty International for this project was a bit different than other work that we have done for different human rights cases. Usually we might be looking at the location of a strike, a bombing, different clues to figure out its timing, etc. In this case, we had no access to the prison whatsoever. There was no journalist, no independent human rights group. So what we were trying to figure out was what is life like in this place where no one can really see what's going on and what it's like to really be under this regime of silence. How does it feel, how do you come to be when you can't even speak, when you're being tortured.

CW: I want to hear more about your work looking into Saydnaya prison in Syria, but first let's just step back a little bit and tell me a bit more about what Forensic Architecture does.

CV: So Forensic Architecture is a research agency based in Goldsmiths, University of London and we are a team, a multidisciplinary team, so a team of architects, artists, filmmakers, but also programmers, journalists, lawyers etc. And what we do is spatial and media analysis for human rights cases. So we work with different NGOs, with different human rights groups and we create an evidence file, so we develop new evidentiary techniques and we present these either in courts or in different legal and political forums, such as the UN, different parliamentary inquiries, People's Tribunals, but also for advocacy purposes. So we use very simple architectural techniques and skills and 3D modeling animation, video editing software, but we are reappropriating those techniques for the purposes of investigation. So we would use kind of modeling tools in order to compose disparate pieces of evidence, such as videos images that might have nothing to do with each other at first glance, but then once we start kind of analyzing them, we realized that they might contain elements that connect them to different pieces of footage. For example, we might look for the shape of a bomb cloud and figure out that there are two or three different videos that describe the same event because we can recognize the same plume of smoke throughout the different footage.

CW: Is that what you call found media?

CV: Yes exactly. So we use found media either from mainstream media, but also from social media, from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. And the way that we work is that we analyze them in time and space and we used 3D models in order to figure out the relationships between the different kinds of evidence. So we can begin to tell the story of what happened.

CW: Take us back to the Saydnaya prison project. What can you tell us about the prison?

CV: So Saydnaya prison is one of the worst places on earth. It is a place where human rights abuses are happening every day. They are routine. They are systematic. It is the last place out of a series of detention centers that any prisoner might go through. So people end up there and they either die there or there's very few people who survive. They're mostly political prisoners, it's important to say. When they arrive there they get what they call a welcome party, so they are tortured to begin with. Their eyes are always closed, so they're always blindfolded. They are always forced to cover their eyes with their hands and then they are taken to a solitary cell that is not really solitary because there's a lot of people in there, but it's just a very small confined space.

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VOICE 1: They will put nine people in every cell. We spent 13 days there. We were all naked. They left the clothes here, here at the door. I would have died if I had spent a month in that cell. The fear was very intense. The fear starts in the afternoon. That's when they start to distribute the food. Food always meant beating.

VOICE 2: But if it's so quiet and you're not allowed to speak, do you hear anything?

VOICE 1: Whispering in terror. If the guard thinks people are talking, he would pull them out and beat them. So if I want to speak to my friend, I would nudge him and whisper. Where are you hurt? Did he hit you? Did he hit you a lot? Where did he hit you the most?

CV: It is really a horrific place. It's an extermination camp, it's not just a prison. They are held under conditions of starvation, cold, diseases, illnesses and this is how the Syrian government deals with political oppositions.

CW: So in 2016, a team from Forensic Architecture headed to Istanbul to sit down with former prisoners of Saydnaya. Before you met them, what did you know about the prison as a physical space?

CV: We had different reports from Amnesty, so some of the testimonies, some of the original testimonies of what was going on in there, but in terms of the actual space, we only had one single satellite image. So all we could see was what the prison looked like from above.

CW: How would you describe it?

CV: Saydnaya is quite classic Panopticon building. It has three distinct configures and the central core in the middle. And the way that it operates is that the central core is always able to look down to the corridors in the three wings. So from the satellite image, we could derive the very basic architecture of the prison. We had no idea what was happening in the interior, this is something that we had to depend on from witness testimony.

CW: So you brought in an artist with you, what was his role?

CV: So Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an artist on one hand, but he's also an acoustic investigator. So his role was to ask questions and examine issues of sound and that is quite important in Saydnaya because exactly there is a regime of silence. Because no one is allowed to speak, no one is allowed to even scream when they're being beaten and so what this creates is this really strange environment where there's absolute silence and every prisoner becomes incredibly acute to different sounds. So they develop a new skill, let's say. And what that means is that they start recognizing little sounds because if the guards opened the doors of the cell and the prisoners didn't assume their safety positions, which is to kneel down, facing the wall, covering their eyes, they would be beaten more. And so very often the guards would try to sneak up on them and then the prisoners started developing the skill of recognizing the smallest sounds and realizing that there might be footsteps approaching them. These were the techniques that would help them survive.

CW: So in these videos the former prisoners are actually sitting in front of computer screens looking at the models that you're creating, as they talk about what happened to them. The process of building a 3D model of a prison through testimony, how does it affect a person's memory of what they experienced?

CV: So this is the technique we developed, which we call the architecture of memory and it's something quite interesting. It kind of borrows from ancient techniques of mnemonics of memory palaces of buildings spaces in order to remember more. But in this case what we see is that memory is also spatial, that memory somehow clinges itself into objects, into textures, into particular kind of properties of space. And so what we find is when we ask people to recreate this space of certain event, when we ask questions of the dimensions of a certain room, the dimensions of a door, the texture of the walls, the dimensions of tiles, et cetera, for the person to retrieve that kind of information, they have to move back into that memory space and all of a sudden they remember more details about it. And somehow the memory of the space is tied together to the memory of the experience to the memory of the event that happened there. So when we asked another one of the ex-detainees to describe how big was the little hatch on the door of the cell, he described in relation to his own head. So he said the size of the hatch is roughly the width of my head and he said the way that I know is that someone asked me to place my head within this hatch. And then begun to torture me through it, to beat me through it. So this kind of shows you how there's no understanding of space for this person other than the really bodily experience of kind of being against that that particular feature of the door and that's the only way that he could relate to it. So this is a memory that came from this very particular question, very simple question, how big was the hatch?

CW: How intertwined is the trauma they experience with the memory when they were recalling it later?

CV: We asked Anas I believe to describe the space where he was tortured and that was just outside of his cell. And he said it was a circular space and we know where his cell was because we were able to identify it from different clues that he gave us and we know that outside his cell, it's a long corridor, quite linear, and we were quite amazed. We modeled this for him and we showed it to him and we said is this what you think it is, a really circular space, and he says that's right. That's how I remember it. And it's incredible because this is an error, but the error is not really to say that his memory is not legitimate, for him the space felt like it's closing up on him. So instead of identifying the error and saying that there's no use for this testimony, what we are trying to figure out that the circumstances actually, the fact that there is this skewing of space means that there is a traumatic effect. There is a reason why that memory was inscribed in a different way and so we find this as further proof of what was going on.

CW: In one of the videos, a detainee is describing the tiles in his cells.

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VOICE: Sometimes we wrote on the walls. We didn't have anything to write with, but we would take a zip as it's made of copper and we could write on the wall with it. We would write and then rub it out with a piece of cloth. Some people have memorized certain parts of the Quran and others know different parts so, they help each other to learn them, very, very quietly. And when that's all finished there is nothing else to do. Sometimes we would repeat our own conversations.

What was the importance of those tiles?

CV: This is another condition that we tried to capture and it's a bit difficult because when there's such horrific events happening within the prison, it's hard to really get a feeling for the day-to-day. And the reality of it is that these people were sitting in an empty cell, they had no furniture, they had nowhere to look at, they had nothing to read, so at some point they would drive themselves mad because of the lack of information. There's also a condition of boredom, which is not the first thing that you would think when someone is being tortured daily, but it is another condition that slowly takes away from your humanity. The prisoners, the detainees, started to look at the little details of this space and almost hallucinate through them. They would remember every little crack and they would remember how the Stones would sit against each other because they were craving for information. And so this is another kind of interesting condition that of timelessness. How you could spend years in a single room and how to describe life within such a space in a kind of linear nards if it wasn't possible. That's why we had to adopt the interactive platform technique because in a way what we were trying to do is to pick out little moments. There's no beginning and end, there's just a continuous being. All we could try to do is allow people to connect with very few moments where they could understand just a little bit of what it's like to be there. It's not easy to identify with it. I don't think we can claim that anyone could think that we know what it's like to be there, but that's the closest we could get.

CW: Now you're leading a project closer to home, one that's still very much a raw memory for many Londoners. A fire in Grenfell Tower, a residential tower block, in West London that killed 72 people one year ago this week. What have you been called in to do?

CV: So this project started really from our own initiative, the day after the fire. We thought that we need to do something, this is our city. These people are you know our people. We have to somehow help in any way that we can and then we realize that this event had been captured by hundreds of people who were just passing by. And so we decided that there would be an evidentiary value to collect all of this footage and to assemble it together in order to figure out a very simple question, where was the fire at any given moment? And that could be a resource that could later be used in whatever process. It's still very early on in the project for us. We are kind of arranging the footage in space and in time by analyzing it through its facades and by creating kind of a reconstruction of the fire.

CW: So from the prison to the Grenfell fire, can you give us an idea of the range of investigations, where Forensic Architecture can contribute.

CV: So we work across scales, we might focus on a single incident, a homicide case for example. We have worked on a single strike on one building that targeted this specific room or we might work in order to examine the whole events of kind of a war in Gaza let's say. We might do a big data project such as was the investigation on the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa in Mexico, that took again like a year to analyze hundreds of narratives. Or we might even do environmental work to analyze let's say forest fires in Indonesia or Indigenous rights in South America. That kind of relates with deforestation and afforestation, etc. So we have quite a diverse way of working. Also part of our mandate being, based on a university, is to design, create, develop and disseminate new methodologies, new evidentiary techniques.

CW: These kinds of investigations into crimes of war and human rights abuses, typically it's international agencies who are doing this work, why do architects also belong in this role?

CV: That's an interesting question. When we talk about contemporary warfare, we have to realize that something has shifted here. Contemporary warfare is mostly urban these days. So whereas in the past people would die in open battlefields, now people mostly die in buildings, in their homes and the building itself is often the very instrument of the weapon of destruction. And so for that reason, architects have something to contribute to this discourse. So we might start by just reading the ruins of a building and figure out what happened, was it an air drop bomb or was it tank fire? Was it a drone or was it demolished by a bulldozer, for example. This is the very simple way that we could kind of respond to this question of what happened there. When we don't have access to the site, when sometimes we can't go to Syria or we can't go to Gaza or we can't go to to Yemen, etc., then we need to depend on media. And there, you also have different aesthetic practitioners such as filmmakers, who understand the very practical features of a video let's say and might understand how a piece of information might be missed because it exists between two different frames of the video. So we as kind of architects, spatial practitioners, but also artists and filmmakers have a way of working, have an understanding of space, of image, of media that can be reappropriated for the purposes of human rights investigations.

CW: It's fascinating work. Thank you very much for joining us.

CV: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

CW: Christina Varvia is an architect and Deputy Director of Forensic Architecture, a group based out of Goldsmiths, University in London, England.

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CW: Coming up in our next half hour, we head to Wisconsin, the heart of American dairy production and one of the key swing states that elected U.S. president, Donald Trump. With dairy farmers, they're feeling the pain. We're asking if Canadian policy is really to blame. I'm Connie Walker, sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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Should the U.S. adopt Canada's supply management system in order to save its dairy farmers?

Guests: Kyle Kurt, Martha Hall Findlay, Bruce Muirhead

CW: Hi. I'm Connie Walker, sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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VOICE: We're also going to stay up for our dairy farmers in Wisconsin and I've been reading about it and I've been talking about it for a long time and that demands really, immediately, fair trade with all of our trading partners and that includes Canada.

CW: That was U.S. president, Donald Trump, at a rally last year railing against Canada's dairy industry. This week he renewed those attacks, calling for an end to tarrifs and demanding that Canada dismantle its supply management system, he has long decried as unfair. Here in Canada, milk marketing boards set quotas for production. The idea is by matching supply to demand, wild fluctuations in the price of milk can be avoided and those wild price fluctuations have definitely been a challenge for American farmers. The price of milk is now so low that last year, Wisconson lost 500 dairy farms and this year so far another 150 farmers have given up as well. One of those farmers is Kyle Kurt. He milked dairy cows for 18 years. In April, he made the decision to sell. He joins me from Dane, Wisconsin. Good morning, Kyle.

KYLE KURT: Morning.

CW: Thank you for doing this. Tell us what happened in April, why did you decide to sell your herd and equipment?

KK: Well, after probably two and a half, three years of struggling on not making ends meet, we just came this spring and we looked what it was going to cost to put drops in and what we were getting, the future what the milk looked like and after '17 of losing money all year, we decided we just couldn't do it no more. We were at the point where we, I lost so much equity from last year that if the future looked, we were going to do the same thing this year and I just couldn't afford to lose any more equity and we decided it was time to get out.

CW: That must have been a difficult decision. I know that for 18 years you've been farming and you must have seen some hard times before. What is different this year?

KK: Well, yeah we did, 2009 was also a you know, really bad year. But you know this year I would say, or '17 I would say felt a lot like tht. And it was just, yeah, it was looking like that was going to just continue and you know our cost of production you know on everything just kept rising and our income was going down. So it was really no choice.

CW: We heard a clip from President Donald Trump saying that Canada's tarrif system and subsidies are to blame for the problems that American farmers are facing. What do you think?

KK: I dont think it's all the blame. I think definitely you know it's not doing us any good, but I think there's a lot of other factors in there to blame, it' just not all Canada.

CW: Help us understand, what are the troubles the U.S. dairy sector is facing?

KK: Well you know, I think we've got, our production keeps rising and the demand is not following with our production. You know we're getting pretty good at what we're doing and production every goes up on you know, the same number of cows. And we're just really good at our job and you know the problem is in the marketplace too, we're fighting with your non-dairies, you know, the silks and all that other that claim to be dairy that aren't, are non-dairy. And I just don't think the consumption, like it used to be, is there anymore. You know, too many people you know are telling everyone that milk's bad for you and all that. I think those are a lot of factors we're fighting too, we're just not, the consumption isn't keeping up with the production. You know, the thing is too is you got other countries that are getting better at dairy too and buying from within. They want to use from their producers, instead of importing it.

CW: Some people are saying that maybe the United States should think about introducing supply management, like what exists in Canada. What do you think of that idea?

KK: Yes, I think there needs to be a way we could do something like that, but the problem is implementing that. How do you put a supply management on when you got, you know you got a lot of farms milking a lot of number of cows, but then you got a small producer like me that was you know, milking 90 cows. So how do you still, if you come with supply management, you're going to have the problem of the bigger ones are just going to be able to afford it. They're going to have the money to buy the cord from the smaller farms, still put the smaller farm out of business. You know and you can see it around here, there's a lot of large farms, but it's just going to be tough to do that, I would say right now. The problem is too, it's already kind of being done through our co-ops lately. A lot of the co-ops are already telling you can't produce any more milk than you have been producing. So in a way, it's kind of happening already, whether we like it or not, the co-ops are telling us this.

CW: I mean, we certainly know that not all farmers favour this idea of supply management. The New York Farm Bureau, which has 20,000 members, opposes it and they oppose government quotas and they say that individual farmers should be able to make their own decisions about their farms. What do you say to that?

KK: Well I kind of agree somewhat, but something's got to be done. You know, losing farmers every day. We can't work for free anymore. You know it actually got to the point where it was less than free work. I wasn't getting enough to pay my bills. So yeah, if they feel that way that they need to figure out another way to do it, where we get paid a fair price. And I don't know how else you're going to do it, but we can't keep producing more and more milk and not have a home for it. You know, that's foolish and kind of reckless. You know, what are you going to do? You know the expansion keeps coming and going and these guys are adding, you know going from two to four to six thousand cows, when we don't have a place for the milk is pretty reckless and foolish, if you ask me.

CW: What about you, what is next for you? How are you making your living now that you've given up the dairy farm?

KK: Well, I sold my farm. I am working for a larger farm, a larger dairy farm now. So I still do crop, a few acres that I rent from my gramp and grandma. Still farming though, have some beef cattle, but my main source of income would be me working on a larger dairy farm.

CW: Well, thank you very much Kyle. We really appreciate you coming on to talk to us.

KK: Yup, no problem.

CW: Okay take care.

KK: Thank you.

Kyle Kurt milked dairy cows for 18 years and we reached him in Dane, Wisconsin. We have two guests standing by to debate the wisdom of the U.S. adopting a supply management system. Martha Hall Findlay is president and CEO of the Canada West Foundation. She's in Calgary. And Bruce Muirhead is a professor of history at the University of Waterloo. He's in Kitchener. Hello and welcome to both.

BRUCE MUIRHEAD: Good morning.

MARTHA HALL FINDLAY: Hello Connie.

CW: Bruce, what do you think, how do you think that supply management would have helped someone like Kyle Kurt or other farmers in the United States?

BM: Oh, I think quite clearly with supply management they wouldn't have the huge oversupply problem that they have now. They also wouldn't be searching for export markets that destabilise other global markets and destabilise competitors too like Australia and New Zealand and the European Union. But that said, I don't think that supply management is a possibility in the U.S. and a large part of that of course, it's based the concept of supply management, the practice of supply management, is based upon a country's history, culture, political culture, society, you know and it's almost a Canada versus U.S. kind of concept, where it goes back to the times of the United Empire Loyalists basically, and the kinds of ideas that they brought north with them. So we're much more organically conservative society than is the U.S., you know it's a hackneyed cliche, but certainly the the term rugged individualist in the US still holds sway, certainly in royal communities I think it holds some sway. So supply management as a possibility in the U.S., simply does not exist, but in Canada, it works extremely well. It governs production, you know it's based upon three pillars: it's based upon producer pricing, production discipline, which is quotas and import management, which is that we dont largely import from global markets, although we do import well more or less big chunk from the U.S. about 550 million dollars worth, last year. So it works in Canada, it's based on our culture history, it's the Canadian system, serves Canadian farmers and Canadian consumers very, very well and I think if we ever got rid of supply management, we would rue the day.

CW: Martha Hall Findlay what do you think of that, do you agree with Bruce?

MHF: Not at all and I think facts matter. Let's remember that this is not all Canadian farmers, at all. So when you talk about rugged individualists, over 90 per cent of Canadian farmers, whether it's beef, pork, grains, pulses, oilseeds, they do not have a supply management and they do very well, thank you very much and they compete internationally and they supply the Canadian market. Dairy, poultry and eggs, as a sector, makes up for now actually less than 6 per cent of Canadian farmers. So let's just be really clear, this is not a Canadian system for Canadian farmers. It is a cartel that protects a very small number of what are now, the average dairy farmer is now a millionaire, a multi-millionaire as a matter of fact. The other thing that I think is really important, I was fascinated listening to the previous interview, Wisconson has about the same number of dairy farms as Canada, it's around 9000 operating dairy farms. And Wisconsin has actually lost, you know, a few hundred farms every year. Canada has actually consolidated, we have fewer farms than, every year we don't lose the farms because it's not a question of losing, it's a question of consolidation, even there you heard Kyle, he sold his operation. He's still working in dairy, which I think is a hugely important aspect to this because it's clear that it's not because dairy is failing, it's because the structure of dairy is changing. There's no question we're seeing larger farms are more efficient. The exact same thing has been happening in Canada. In fact, our rate of consolidation, we have that many fewer dairy farmers every year, even than Wisconsin. So it might make for a big headline, but it simply is not, we have the same in fact, as I said, even greater consolidation in Canada.

BM: Sorry could I intervene here. I agree facts do matter and the facts are wilfully distorted it seems to me, by the people who oppose supply management. Of course, we dont have supply management in grain, canola or soy beans, the big issue about eggs say and dairy theory is that very, very small percentages of total global production are traded internationally and in the case of dairy, it's about 7 per cent. That means 93 per cent is consumed at home. You can't say the same about grain or canola or soy beans. In the case of eggs, it's 3 per cent that are consumed that are exported traded internationally. So those kinds of commodities actually lend themselves to a supply managed model, simply because they aren't largely traded internationally. And I hear people like Ms. Findlay talk about the great export markets that exist out there for Canadian dairy. There are no great export markets and in fact, I've interviewed about 60 Australian and New Zealand dairy farmers over the past couple of years and they despair for their futures and they dispair. Australia is the example of what Canada will become should we get rid of supply management, where things are not at all working in fact, they're on target now to produce fewer than 9 billion litres of milk. They produced more than 12 billion when they deregulated in 2001. Their export share of the export market has gone down quite considerably from 9 per cent to 4 per cent. So we're talking about 4 percent of the 7 percent that's opened globally. So I mean there is just no, there is no export market. It's a domestically focused commodity, eggs and dairy, doesn't travel very well, milk is heavy, eggs are fragile. So those kinds of commodities are largely consumed domestically, hugely consumed domestically and they lend themselves to a model like supply management.

MHF: I'm sorry, Professor Muirhead, but when you say that only seven to nine percent of global trade of global production is traded, that seven to nine percent is almost ten times more than the entire Canadian dairy production. So you can use a small percentage, but in fact global markets are huge and they are growing. The United States has increased its export of dairy fivefold, in the last number of years. There are huge export markets. The fact that Australia has struggled has an awful lot to do with the fact that they also suffered a couple of years of major drought. So we can't use, you know, pick and choose the examples of a country like Australia that has no question had some challenges, but there are ways to deal with that that are different than supply management and Australia does that. New Zealand continues to export all around the world. They have a terrific system in the sense that Fonterra is a co-op that is owned by virtually all of the dairy farmers in New Zealand. So they cooperate, not only in terms of production, but they cooperate in terms of what they do from an export perspective. It's actually a great system. Agropur in Canada is a co-op owned by about a third of Canadian farmers. That's a terrific system. What's really frustrating though is Agropur in Canada, does its processing for Canadian market, which is only you know 33 million people. Agropur now processes because we can't export, our system won't let us export. Agropur set up operations in the United States. Agropur, owned by Quebec dairy farmers, now processes more American milk than Canadian milk. It is now creating more American jobs than Canadian jobs. Saputo, another dairy processing company, is far larger in its operations around the world than it is now in Canada because we can't expand. I have younger dairy farmers come to me and frankly they come very quietly, they have to be secretive about it because the level of intimidation by those who want to maintain a system that enriches them, it is worth repeating, the average dairy farmer in Canada is worth, net worth close to five million dollars. That's the average...

BM: Actually that's not true.

MHF: It is true.

BM: No.

MHF: It is actually.

BM: It isn't true.

MHF: And the average and so says the egg farmer's chair.

BM: Yes because I know, as you said at the beginning, facts do matter. That's an alternative fact actually.

MHF: I'm sorry. Well, it's not. But if you ask anybody who is not actually involved in the lobby, in the business or otherwise supported by it, you will find that in fact, those facts are facts.

CW: Martha I just want to jump in here for a second because we're obviously talking about this in light of the recent comments by President Trump who called out our supply management system and we spoke, we heard earlier from a Wisconsin farmer, who talked about overproduction. We know that 100 million gallons of milk were dumped into American farm fields in 2016. Do you think there is a risk that there would be a glut of dairy in Canada, if we didn't have this supply management system?

MHF: You have to remember that dairy is like any other production. So what do the beef farmers do? What do the canola farmers do? They manage their production, sometimes it doesn't fit with world markets, that's part of what happens with world market. So as I said earlier and I found Kyle's comments very interesting because he was not blaming supply management, he was and again he is working in dairy still.

CW: He said that supply does not match the demand, that they're overproducing and there is not the demand for the milk they're producing.

MHF: And every once in a while that happens in every business and happens in every sector. In the United States there is an insurance opportunity, as there is with every other farm approach. So you know, our view is the system enrichens a very small number of producers in Canada, by no means, all Canadian farmers. As I said, over 90 per cent of Canadian farmers do not benefit from this and the United States has in fact, as I said before, the United States exports have increased fivefold in the last decade. Of course they're going to sometimes in ramping up the production to take advantage of those markets, they're going to find that well gee, they're competing. And so sometimes they're going to compete, sometimes they're not. Everyone else competes.

CW: So Wisconsin alone lost 500 dairy farms last year and this year another 150 farmers like Kyle Kurt have also lost their farms. So you don't think there's a risk.

MHF: But Connie, Canada has the same number of farms as Wisconsin. Both Wisconsin and Canada have about 9000 operating farms.

BM: Actually has many more. Many, more cows.

MHF: Excuse me, I'm talking about the number, if you want to use a headline, that is Wisconsin lost 500 dairy farmers last year, Canada lost a proportionately even more than that in the same amount of time. Significantly more percentage. The key is that you're not losing farms. It's a question of consolidation. Kyle sold his operation. A lot of people decide that they don't want to run a business anymore. He sold his operation. He is still operating in dairy. It's a great headline, but the Canadian system is.

CW: I want to ask. I want to hear from Bruce for a second, Bruce if American dairy farmers would benefit from supply management, why are such a large number of them opposed to it? I think it's part of their political culture and political history. They just don't. They can't rely on government to create the legislative framework as the Canadian government did back in 1966, to establish a system like supply management. Supply management is entirely farmer run as well. There's no government involvement, at all. But just to go back to what Ms. Hall Findlay was saying a couple of minutes ago. I agree, facts do matter. And the facts, I don't recognise really the systems that she's talking about. I don't know if she's spoken with, interviewed Australian and New Zealand dairy farmers as I have. But they've suffered through a lot more than just a couple of blips along the way. Plus, the Fonterra system is their version of supply management, it's just based on export. You can't produce for Fonterra, unless you own shares in Fonterra and the average farmer in New Zealand might own a million shares in Fonterra and it trades for about six dollars New Zealand for a share. So you know, this is a highly regulated system as well. They haven't gone to the market. In fact, it's very, very structured. But even so of course, based upon export markets, you can look at New Zealand and see that those farmers have absolutely suffered incredibly over the last number of years. You know their debt loads have gone from 32 billion total to fifty billion dollars in total, to the point where the New Zealand Reserve Bank is actually concerned about the stability of the New Zealand economy, based on debt levels that have been driven up by New Zealand dairy farmers and dairy is the single largest export of New Zealand.

CW: I want to bring this back to why we're talking about this today and it's because of President Trump's attacks on this dairy industry. What do you think of those attacks, Bruce?

BM: I think we are not part of the problem. We're a part of the solution. You know as you mentioned at the beginning, when you spoke with Kyle Kurt, from Wisconsin, I was invited to speak to the Wisconsin Dairy Farmers Union in January of 2017 and went down and I would say everybody, there were about 300 farmers or 400 farmers in the audience, they were all in favour of supply management. So as I say, we are not part of the problem, we're part of the solution in this in that we have production controls in place. So we're not contributing to the global glut of dairy products. Dairy prices, global dairy prices are down about 55 per cent since 2014. You know and I think Ms. Hall Findlay talked about U.S. dairy exports are up fivefold, that may be the case, but they're up five fold from a very, very low level. In fact, the percentage share of American dairy markets around the world has dropped in the last couple of years because competition is simply too ferocious and areas like the European Union are willing to subsidize their producers to the point where they actually dump milk in foreign markets and the Americans are too. They have an operation that's wholly owned by the National Milk Producers Federation called, Cooperatives Working Together and basically what they do is subsidize the export of milk. So if we're going to get into that market, how are we going to compete against the Americans who have massive subsidy schemes in place. The Europeans who have a massive glut of dairy products and massive subsidies as well and then the poor old Australians are losing market share left, right and centre and the New Zealand farmers they ask me why don't the Americans respond to market forces?

MHF: All of which is in the context of massively increased global consumption of dairy, I mean frankly.

BM: But the world is in glut.

MHF: I think that Canadian farmers can't compete.

BM: They can't.

MHF: Because all of our other farmers do. And Connie, just to talk about trade in a second.

CW: We're running out of time.

MHF: We have to understand too, the United States used to subsidize dairy massively, no question. That level has dropped dramatically. We want a level playing field for sure, but you can't keep saying that because it simply is no longer true.

BM: It is to the point of billions of dollars.

MHF: In NAFTA, there are five big issues, dispute settlements, sunset clause, auto sector by American and supply management. We can't give on four of those, they're way too much in the national interest, but not only should we give on supply management, it's in Canada's interest to do so and we can use that leverage to get advantage on the other sectors that are so important. We should not be doing this because Donald Trump says, we should be doing it because it's the right thing for Canada.

BM: No I think that.

CW: Alright, I'm going ot have to leave it there. Bruce I apologize, but thank you both very much for joining us. We'll have to agree to disagree this morning.

MHF: Thanks Connie.

BM: Thanks very much.

CW: Martha Hall Findlay is president and CEO of the Canada West Foundation. She is in Calgary. And Bruce Muirhead is a professor of history at the University of Waterloo. He is in Kitchener. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting is on the show to talk about his latest book, which revisits the characters from his classic novel and kills one off too. And remember, you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Finally, earlier in today's show, I spoke with Christina Varvia of Forensic Architecture, about one of their many projects, the Grenfell tower of fire investigation in London, England. Well this week marks one year since the tragedy that took 72 lives. And while a British inquiry into how it happened continues, two teenaged survivors of the Grenfell fire have just released a song in memory of friends they lost. Here are the two 13-year-olds, Yousra and Johara, who lived at the foot of the building, with their song, "Fire in Grenfell." I'm Connie Walker. Anna Maria Tremonti will be back with you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Current.

Song: "Fire in Grenfell" by Yousra & Johara

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June 13, 2018 episode transcript

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