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The Current Transcript for October 31, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

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Prologue

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Republicans divided on how to respond to Mueller investigation and indictments

Guests: Mica Mosbacher, David Frum

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Today's announcement has nothing to do with The President, has nothing to do with the president's campaign. We've been saying from day one there's been no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion and nothing in the indictment today changes that at all.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: There was spin from the podium and outrage on Twitter and the Trump White House was quickly dismissive of the charges and revelations laid out by the Office of the U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The analysis is that Mr. Mueller is just getting started. But in a polarized political world not everyone sees it that way and that's splintered view reaches right into the Republican Party. So is this a mere distraction or the start of an unraveling? We'll hear differing views in just a moment. Also today while Washington still debates the level of Russian involvement in U.S. politics, Vladimir Putin's fingerprints are all over Ukraine.

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I think that Putin has the same phobia that Stalin had about Ukraine. You know he sees Ukraine not – It is not a foreign country to him. It's not even a you know just another province. He sees it as an existential threat.

MICA MOSBACHER: Good morning. Trick or treat?

AMT: Well, what did you think when you heard about yesterday's indictments?

MICA MOSBACHER: To some degree I'd been expecting this. Obviously once they appointed Mueller several months ago we were awaiting an outcome and after the raid on Paul Manafort’s home in Alexandria, Virginia, it was just a matter of time before I felt he could possibly be charged. I have to say that I've known Paul in political circles for over 20 years. So, I like many people who had worked with him was very surprised. But the most significant thing is the fact that in this 31 page indictment that the charges and the timeline are prior to his five month involvement in the Trump campaign. It dates all the way back to actually under the President Obama's administration. And I wanted to draw the viewers’ attention to paragraph 21 in the indictment. I spoke with a former FBI agent yesterday who was in charge of New York's public corruption and organized crimes unit who stated that there is direct mention of the fact that the Gates Manafort lobbying teams should be prepared to brief The President and this would be in about November 2012. They should be prepared to brief the president on Company A and Company B regarding lobbying activities, that president would be Obama. So again Paul Manafort was charged with the delegate selection process at the national convention for the DOP in Cleveland last year.

AMT: We should we should point out that the money that money laundering payments for which he is charged went from approximately 2006 to 2016. So he joined the Trump campaign in 2016 so there's a bit of overlap there.

MICA MOSBACHER: Again we'd have to look at the timeline…

AMT: The timeline is in the paper.

MICA MOSBACHER: Well that's the media. It's not a court of law. And I really have to caution viewers that these are alleged delegations and he pleaded innocent yesterday. So we've got to let this play out in due process and let Mueller do his job.

AMT: It is now pretty clear that George Papadopoulos has been an informant for the Mueller investigation. Does that worry you?

MICA MOSBACHER: I don't know if it's correct to say it was an informant for the Mueller investigation. You know obviously the role and the typical role in these types of investigations is to bring in the smaller fish and literally go on a fishing expedition to see what you can find possibly on someone else. Again George Papadopoulos was a volunteer - an unpaid campaign volunteer - with a limited role and his job was to help advise on Greece by the way, not Russia.

AMT: Paul Manafort was an unpaid campaign volunteer too. Was he not? So was Jared Kushner.

MICA MOSBACHER: Paul Manafort, I don't have any knowledge of what his salary was. So I can't comment on that.

AMT: Apparently he was and as was Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner.

MICA MOSBACHER: But we could debate all day long…

AMT: No no. But you make the point that he was underpaid. So does that really have anything to do with it?

MICA MOSBACHER: Yes. Yes because there was a difference. You're talking about individuals and others such as Carter Page that never worked in the campaign offices. They didn't have day to day interaction with campaign staff. They were more or less on the side, lumped into a group of many individuals who could be called on to give input into the campaign. But bear in mind the campaign was focused on Americans not foreign policy at that point. So it was a very minimal role whereas Jared Kushner was there on a day to day basis. There's a big difference.

AMT: How concerned are President Trump and his team by these indictments?

MICA MOSBACHER: You know I think that we are - I can't speak for the White House by the way - but I would say, as a Republican, I think we welcome getting to the bottom of this because there's been over all these months and all these thousands of interviews, there's been absolutely no evidence of Russian collusion. And collusion by the way is not a crime, conspiracy is. But there has been absolutely no proof, nothing burger in this country is proving any kind of collusion.

AMT: Mr. Mueller is not done however, is he?

MICA MOSBACHER: No he'll do his job, and I have to say I have respect for him. He served in the FBI as the director from 2001 to 2013. He is certainly under attack. He's under attack by Trump's base. Newt Gingrich has said that there is a conflict of interest because of his role during the so-called uranium one deal under the Obama administration and under Secretary Clinton's tenure. But he is respected. What is significant though is that there is being a call among Trey Gowdy and others of the Senate Intelligence Committee for a second prosecutor in this country to look into this Uranium One scandal and the sale of your Canadian company to the Soviets.

AMT: Well to the Russians there are no Soviets anymore, of course.

MICA MOSBACHER: Well, sorry the Russians. Updating myself. Updating myself.

AMT: Soviet Union. Yes it has been gone since 1991. But if you're talking - you're talking about the Obama administration's approval in 2010 of the Uranium One deal. A Canadian company that controlled a portion of the U.S. uranium was sold to a Russian company. Hillary Clinton did not actually sit on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. which approved that deal. All nine members of the committee approved it, not Miss Clinton. We know that. That's fact.

MICA MOSBACHER: Well she was secretary of state. And the problem is, and again speaking yesterday with a former FBI agent, the issue is the donations to the Clinton Foundation. There are some irregularities there. Again I'm not an attorney but why are we not bringing Mrs. Clinton in for questioning.

AMT: She's not the president of the United States. That's why.

MICA MOSBACHER: There were still irregularities committed including the investigation into her personal server and the fact that she was interviewed by the FBI on a Saturday July 4th weekend. And then on the following Tuesday, before the agents were allowed to completely investigate, calmly announced that she had been cleared of charges and that four witnesses were given immunity which I've gathered from what I've been told from two different FBI informants, that's highly irregular.

AMT: Mica Mosbacher I want you to hold on we'll come back to you in a few minutes. I'd like to bring someone else into this conversation. Many conservatives are concerned by President Trump's handling of the Mueller investigation. David Frum is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He joins us from Washington. Hello.

DAVID FRUM: Hello.

AMT: What are your thoughts as you listen to Ms. Mosbacher?

DAVID FRUM: What happened, Monday is an important chapter. It's really the beginning of the regular conflict. Until now we've been in pre-history of this investigation. Here's what we have known to this point and here's what we are about to learn. What we have known as Russia undertook an industrial scale intervention into U.S. politics in 2016, in order to elect Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton. That is [unintelligible] with what they have done in other countries, where in France, even in Germany where Russia has attempted to support various kinds of pro-Russian reactionary parties against more traditional political parties, and Donald Trump identified himself that way. Donald Trump and his campaign made contact with Russia as we now know, thanks not only to George Papadopoulos but to the revelation by Jared Kushner of the e-mail traffic involving Don Trump Jr. in June of 2016. The Trump campaign made a series of connections with representatives of the Russian state, not just ordinary Russians but representatives of the Russian state, representatives of Russian intelligence agencies. At precisely that moment, the Trump campaign suddenly veered in a very pro-Russian anti-NATO direction. That's when Donald Trump began giving interviews in which said he might not defend Estonia if it were attacked. That's when Paul Manafort, who was Donald Trump's campaign chairman, rewrote the Republican platform in Cleveland to rule out any kind of assistance to Ukraine. And that is of course when the document dumps of previously hacked e-mails from Hillary Clinton from other Democrats began to impact the American election. One of the things that is striking about the coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign, is everyone remembers the Access Hollywood Tape moment, and everyone remembers the WikiLeaks talk. Those occurred 45 minutes apart. And as the Russians had been had been holding onto their biggest cache of hacked e-mails for the critical moment of the campaign, Access Hollywood hit. That was to grab them by the pussy audio. It sent the Republican Party to shock, important Republicans disassociate themselves from Donald Trump, within 45 minutes, WikiLeaks dropped this cache. And the Trump campaign, which was ready had a campaign plane ready to go on how to use those WikiLeaks documents to build a pretty specious but still temporarily effective campaign against Hillary Clinton. How much contact there was back and forth between Russia and the Trump campaign? A lot of them still don't know. Did the Trump campaign assist in any way Russian placing its ads on Facebook or other communications? We don't know the answer to that. But it is clear Russia helped. The Trump people actively communicated with Representative Russian intelligence. What they said back to Russia remains a mystery. But I think it's a mystery that we're closer to finding the answer to it.

AMT: Well you are now urging Republican senators to speak publicly on this issue. What are your concerns? Why are you saying this?

DAVID FRUM: Because I think we're headed to one real constitutional crisis the United States. As you heard in the previous interview, the Trump defence on the facts is flimsy to nonexistent. Where the administration is going to end up having to go in order to defend itself. And they haven't. This is prefigured in some op eds on this weekend's Wall Street Journal editorial page which has become kind of message board to the Trump administration. The place they're going to end up, in 10 days to two weeks, is arguing that even if Donald Trump fire James Comey - and that's the thing that triggered this investigation - even if he fired the head of the FBI in order to shut down an investigation into the president's own wrongdoing, that was within the president's power. The president had a right to do that. That is where the argument is going. That's a fundamental attack on the applicability of law at the office of the presidency. Republicans are watching this kind of messaging avalanche from Fox, from Wall Street Journal, from other places, where their [unintelligible] are being prepared to accept this argument. If they don't stand up now, these are not heroes. If they don't set up now and say “I want this administration to continue. We defend Mueller and this evidence is important and needs to be heard and has national security implications” they are going to be born along and the whole part is going to be pulled after Trump into the deep blue sea.

AMT: So you're making the point, though, that because of that editorial in The Wall Street Journal saying “time to issue a blanket presidential pardon” that that's a signal that those who know something in the party or who understand the system, understand that more is coming, and they're trying to already mitigate.

DAVID FRUM: The way messaging campaigns work in the White House is a small number of people get together and try to come up with some lines and they try different things. And then they have an innermost circle. And that would include people like Sean Hannity and the Wall Street Journal who try them first. And then you get an outer circle of people go on cable television networks and repeat them and then you get a third circle and a fourth circle. [Unintelligible] you've been hearing in the past. It's sort of, it's like a series of ripples from a central campaign that is experimented. It's like a focus group. Will this work? Will this generate responses in our political base? The politicians become victims of this. They get trapped. If you can generate enough Republican enthusiasm over something as stupid as the Uranium One story, then maybe you can commit Republican senators to position where they have to take it seriously, and go along with the White House position, and impede Muller's work, and distract, and not protect the 2018 election from the same kind of Russian intervention that happened 2016. And one of the many things that his comments about what is happening right now is that Trump administration has absolutely refused to do anything to harden American election systems against a Russian intervention. That was so successful for the Russians that why wouldn't they try it again. They did it in France in the spring of 2017.

AMT: And so you're saying the Republican Party needs to take a step back and look after its own survival here, as opposed to Trump's survival.

DAVID FRUM: The Republican party long after Donald Trump ends up in whatever faith he is. But this party could be headed to a cataclysmic event in 2018. And he could be headed to a decade of disgrace. I mean if it turns out, as the evidence sort of indicates or suggests - I don't want to say confirms, that a presidential campaign cooperated with a hostile foreign power to subvert and contaminate and pervert the American political system. That is the biggest… That would be, if shown to be true, the biggest political scandal in American history.

AMT: And yet Mr. Trump supporters will say “no evidence yet. We are right, you are wrong.”

DAVID FRUM: Well I don't know what is… I mean his talkers will say that because talkers will say anything, but Trump's base is shrinking fast. You know you'll see these statistics that say, for example, 85% of Republicans still support The President. But as you know from a fraction the denominator also matters. We have lost five points of Republicans in the overall national political composition in the past year. So yes Donald Trump is holding on to that top line, the numerator line, but the denominator - the number of Republicans in the country, is shrinking. What happens is not that people say “I've lost faith in Trump therefore I will give a negative answer to question ‘do I as Republican support Donald Trump?’ I just stop identifying as a Republican all together.” Everyone is active in the… I have seen that in our families. We are losing family members who are re-affiliated or dropped out. And what happens in Virginia this week, where there's going to be important state election, is an indication. This is a place where the issues are all national. If the Democrats or Republicans do badly, that's a harbinger of what's to come.

AMT: David Frum, thanks for your perspective.

DAVID FRUM: Thank you very much. Bye bye.

AMT: David Frum senior editor at The Atlantic. He's in Washington and I'm going to bring Mica Mosbacher back into the conversation. You've been listening in. What you say? You're a long-time Republican? What do you say to what David Frum says about the fact that Republicans need to look after their party now?

MICA MOSBACHER: Two things. First of all, the Republicans are absolutely disgusted and frustrated with what they perceive as a do nothing Congress, primarily the Senate and especially on the heels of the failure to pass the health care repeal and replacement bill. Secondly, it is do or die in terms of tax reform. The president is focused on bringing jobs back to America and some of the largest tax cuts in in decades. But let me say something quickly. The Republican Party the DOP RNC has raised over $100 billion in nine months. This is record fund raising and a large portion for the first time ever has come from small donors. DNC raised 44.1 million. I look at money coming in not polling. I think that these individuals are firmly behind our president. And there might be whispers of collusion but there is absolutely no proof.

AMT: And so do you totally reject the idea that Mr. Mueller is continuing and there may well be proof down the road?

MICA MOSBACHER: I say let's let this process play out. But again I think that we're looking for Congressman and Senators with backbone and that would involve hiring another or appointing another special prosecutor to look at the Clintons.

AMT: Mica Mosbacher we have to leave it there. Thank you. Mica Mosbacher member of the 2020 Trump campaign national advisory board and a former Republican National Committee finance co-chair. She is in Washington. Let us know what you think of what you just heard. You can tweet us we are @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. The CBC News is next and then a child's eye view of the Syrian war. We will meet Bana Alabed, seven years old when she became a social media sensation tweeting about family life inside Aleppo, when the city was under siege. Bana and her mother Fatemah in our next half hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio 1, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

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7-year-old Syrian girl who tweeted from Aleppo shares her story in new book

Guests: Bana Alabed, Fatemah

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: Still to come Anne Applebaum won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Gulag: A History, now The Washington Post columnist has an important new book out. Read Famine is about the event that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early thirties. It was a Soviet forced of starvation and understanding the famine is key to understanding the ongoing conflict between those countries today. Anne Applebaum joins me, in half an hour, and I'll be sure to ask her thoughts on the latest Russian related developments in Washington as well. But first to a modern day siege and an inspiring survivor.

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BANA ALABED: Hello my friend. Howe are you? We are fine today.

AMT: Just seven years old and trapped in the middle of a civil war. But Bana Alabed voice rang out loud and clear for the whole world to hear. Thanks to Twitter. Bana and her family were living in Aleppo, Syria when the city came under siege in 2016. The roads in and out were blocked. Food and supplies were no longer getting in. But Bana, with the help of her mom, Fatemah, started sending messages out on social media. Sometimes her tweets were simple like “Please stop the war we are tired.” Or “Speaking for the children of Aleppo, I demand peace for us.” Sometimes, she tweeted songs or short videos sharing her family's plight as bombs exploded in the background.

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BANA ALABED: We are afraid.

AMT: Now Bana's posts weren't without controversy. There were critics who claimed they were fake, or that she was being used as propaganda by rebel fighters. But for as long as she kept tweeting Bana's posts helped bring a seemingly intractable civil war into the clarifying perspective of a child's eye view. Bana was able to leave Aleppo during the December 2016 ceasefire. She is eight years old now, living in Turkey. She has written a book about her experience called Dear World, Bana and her mom Fatemah came into our New York studio to talk about it.

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BANA ALABED: I would like to read you my favorite part of the book. My mommy told me I was born with a smile on my face. She says that I was always happy even though I never wanted to sleep because I didn't want to miss anything.

FATEMAH: Dear Bana, your name means tree, in Arabic. We choose this because it is a strong name and we wanted a strong little girl, and you are, Bana. You are strong and you are frail.

BANA ALABED: I had many reaons to be happy. When I was little my Baba always took me to the swimming at a lot of [unintelligible] boat, which was my favorite thing to do.

FATEMAH: You came into the world with a wisdom that everyone around you seen and was drawn to.

BANA ALABED: I want to also go to market with my uncles to get a jello, always red.

FATEMAH: I wrote to Bana some letters because I want her to feel proud of her Syrian blood. She is my hero, really, and she teach me everything in this life. The meaning of hope. The meaning of life.

[Sound: Oriental music]

FATEMAH: You had three perfect years in Syria, Bana. I hope you will never lose those memories from before the war.

[Sound: Oriental music]

VOICE: Marhaba. Welcome to Syria, an ancient country of culture, located between the Mediterranean and the desert.

FATEMAH: The life, especially in Aleppo, was so wonderful before the war.

VOICE: Its ancient desert Metropolis old villages, impenetrable fortresses, and biblical harbour towns have witnessed the rich and fascinating history of bygone times.

[Sound: Oriental music]

FATEMAH: We can hang out. We can go to restaurant. Everyone can have fun.

BANA ALABED: It was like going to the park. I was playing. I was very happy with my dad and mom.

VOICE: We begin in Syria where tens of thousands of people took to the streets for a day of mass demonstrations.

[Sound: Crowds chanting]

FATEMAH: When this war start everything changed. Like there was a moment before and after. And in this moment everything stuck.

[Sound: Crowds chanting]

VOICE: But once again the regime answered the calls for reform with gunfire.

[Sound: Gunfire and shouting]

BANA ALABED: I cannot go outside because when I go outside the warplanes in the sky and it will bomb. And I feel very sad [sound: Missile] when the bombs come to my house I feel scared. I wake up go to school. And I hear something and I feel scared. [Sound: Bombing] I go to the kitchen and close my eyes tightly. And then the glasses from the window come to my bed. Yes. And I feel scared.

FATEMAH: It is very hard to remember that time because till now when I remember I shaking. I was very scared for my children that because they were in my mother house because I had exam that time. I saw a big and huge smoke in the sky. I thought that something happened to my children and I couldn't reach the house easily. When I saw the kids it was the happiest moment in my life even more than when I saw them first time in this life.

[Sounds: Bombing]

BANA ALABED: No word. Hear that.

[Sound: Bombing]

BANA ALABED: I was saying to mom anybody knows what happened to us, like today my school bombed, my home bombed. And my and me decided to tweeting and saying to the world about our life. [Through Twitter] Good morning from Aleppo. We are still alive. [Back to studio] And the people start to listen to us. And I have millions and millions. And I feel happy that the world listen to me and they are helping the children. [Through Twitter] This is my message. It is never too late. Save the people of Syria.

FATEMAH: I want to raise awareness in the war that my country really needs help.

[Sound: Music]

BANA ALABED: [Singing to the music] I am a child with something…

FATEMAH: The children of my country are losing their lives here.

BANA ALABED: [Singing to the music] I am a child who wants to play why don’t you [unintelligible] me.

FATEMAH: We are really losing everything.

BANA ALABED: [Singing to the music] My dolls are waiting. My friends are praying, small hearts are begging give us a chance. Give us a chance.

FATEMAH: We need the war to stop. We need our children to be normal children like other children in the world.

BANA ALABED: I tried to make something to play. Like the slide, I make it from the sofa and with the board.

FATEMAH: I want to see the smile on my daughter face like when I saw it the first time when she came to this world.

[Sound: Music]

BANA ALABED: [Crying] This Syrian boy lost his legs. I am very sad. Where is the humanity. The children needs deserve lives. Please save the children of Syria.

[Sound: Music]

FATEMAH: They deserve to be a children. Not a victims. Not to be, see something bad like Bana saw her freind.

BANA ALABED: When my friend Yasmeen died, I miss her very much. I will tell you the story. I wake up and I see like it was night. But it was morning. Everywhere was dusty. I was coughing cause I can't breath. My dad grab my hand, Leith hand, Nour hand, Mom hand and go to that basement. When it stopped we go up. And the neighbour would say “are you okay [unintelligible] and your family?” We say “Okay.” And we hear something. Yes my mom was. Crying and saying: “No. No. No!” And we go there and we see a lot of dust in her. And she was crying. And the white helmet come and they was digging and they hold a body. She was Yasmeen. She was like sleeping. But she wasn't. She was dead. The blood on her face, they was like crying. And. All of that dust on her body. Just her cheeks not dusty. And my mom said let's go back Bonbon. And another day we hear Yasmeen mom crying. Yasmeen mom say to me “Yasmeen dead.” And I feel very sad and I cried. And I say I can't play with her anymore. Or go with her to the school. I miss her very much.

VOICE: In Syria bombs are falling on Aleppo this morning the U.N. says more than 200 people have been killed since the regime launched a new offensive. Meanwhile…

BANA ALABED: [Coughing] [Through Twitter]Hello my friends. How are you? Stand with Aleppo and in the siege I will try to be alive on Sunday, if there is no bombing and it is good. Thank you. Bye.

FATEMAH: The hardest thing not just the bomb. As a parents, the children or family want a lot of things. They have needs, especially when there is nothing, no food or no clean water.

VOICE 2: Human rights groups and eyewitnesses say pro-Syrian government forces have closed the only road leading into and out of the city of Aleppo. They say hundreds of thousands of people in the rebel held northern parts of the city are now under siege. That's raised fears of a humanitarian crisis. The U.N. says nearly 300,000 people rely on the road for travel, food and medicine.

FATEMAH: When we heard that there a siege we tried to not make our family suffer. So we try to save some food like macarona or rice that we can save for them for a long time because we don't know the siege how long it would be.

BANA ALABED: Just we was eating macarona and rice. I hate macarona and rice because every day we ate it. Just I say to mom when it was eat “Mom what you will cook?” She say “Normal. Rice and macaroni.” I say to her I want to eat different. She say “We don’t have because we are in siege.” And I feel very sad because there is no chicken or like some of fruits. I miss like that.

FATEMAH: Sometimes we stay one day without water sometimes two, [Bana coughing in background] when we find it is so dirty and you cannot drink it. Sometimes we try to boil the water twice. But still you cannot drink. But we must drink some. I think this is the hardest thing in the life that you cannot provide to your family what they need.

BANA ALABED:[Through Twitter] Don’t have food. Aleppo under siege.

[Sound: Engine]

VOICE: A convoy of trucks loaded with food and medicine on the move, delivering desperately needed supplies to parts of Syria, but not to Aleppo. The United Nations says it's simply too dangerous for deliveries to be made to the city under siege by Syrian government forces, backed up in the air by Russia. [Sound: Bombing] President Bashar Alassad…

FATEMAH: Even yhen you were thrown out of their clothes, I couldn't go to market because all the shops are empty because the siege. But finally I found for her something, but it was a boy clothes.

BANA ALABED: I said to Mom “I don't want this clothes. I don't want to be a boy. I am girl. I want to buy clothes girls, like a dress, like girls.”

FATEMAH: Even though they are not suitable for her, it is winter and she should have some.

BANA ALABED: It was very cool and I said to her “Okay. I will wear it.” And I feel very sad. And I was crying.

FATEMAH: And she said “No Mommy. Idon't want these. I am not a boy. I am a girl.” I said “We have to, Bana, we don't have anything.”

BANA ALABED: When the winter finish like there is more boys. I say to her “Okay. It is enough. I don't want boys because I am a boy.”

FATEMAH: This is the hardest thing. And when you are just moving from house to house to keep your family safe. And I really hope no one has this experience in his life.

VOICE 2: Eastern Aleppo is now enduring a fifth straight day of punishing air strikes.

FATEMAH: The worst moments in my life that when my heart bombed, and we had to leave. With all these bombs our homes still the safe things that we hope we still in it until they were finished. And we kept hoping that one day the peace will back to my home to my home, Syria, my land, to Aleppo, all the people can live again in peace, like before the war. We are one family of millions of Syrians family who are suffer there in Syria. The war did nothing for us just bring the death and hunger for all the Syrian. And displaced them, they became without homes like us.

BANA ALABED: [Through Twitter]Hello my friends. How are you? I am sick. I need medicine [coughs]I.

FATEMAH: I was worried to fight that because of our tweet that we were targeted. And it is, because my house bombed for a purpose. And when I flee out my house I be very scared that they will know where I am now. So I was very afraid that they will reach me and reach my family. So I tried to make anything that they cannot follow me anywhere; that I take off my SIM card from my phone so they not follow me or target us. And I tried to hide Bana always, not seem like a girl. “Oh she looks like Bana”, so no one knows her.

[Sound: News music]

VOICE 2: Escape from Aleppo.

VOICE 3: They will take over the city here. If they will found any opposition member there they will kill them, anyway.

VOICE 2: Thousands of civilians flee the city.

FATEMAH: When there were ceasefire and there were agreement about take all the people out of the siege, out of Aleppo to countryside. We were waiting for buses. First time when the buses came, we couldn't get on the buses because we thought that maybe it's not safe.

VOIVE 4: The evacuation was canceled yesterday when the Syrian regime pounded Eastern Aleppo with airstrikes and rebel forces launched artillery shells.

FATEMA: We get on the buses in the next day. But before we get on the buses we were waiting from 5:00 a.m. till 1:00 p.m. When the buses appear, my children were crying and they were saying to me “Mom that bus is here. Please please let us go.” I said “Wait I want be sure that this time it's safe. Not like that last time.”

[Sounds: Air raids]

VOICE 5: That desperate evacuation began with ambulances ferrying the most vulnerable first, the injured and sick. Civilians are leaving too, as many as 2000 have already boarded buses…

FATEMAH: When we get on the buses and the bus start moving but suddenly it is stopped. And we don't know why the reason to stop. We were waiting and waiting, hour, two hours, five hours. Evening come then 1 a.m., 2 a.m. There was nothing.

BANA ALABED: When it stopped, we feel scared like something good will happen to us.

FATEMAH: We don't prepare ourself that we will stay all this time. It was all the distance between the city and the country just 20 minutes no more.

BANA ALABED: And there was no water no food. Children was crying. The children want to go to the bathroom.

FATEMAH: This is the scared moment for us because we were in the siege, in the regime area. At any time maybe the regime will take us, maybe they will bump us because we are all in their heads.

VOICE 5: As many as two thousands has already boarded buses. They've been given safe passage out of Aleppo to Idlib Province, another parts of Syria under opposition control.

BANA ALABED: In the morning like the sun rise. The bus move and we feel happy that nothing happened to us.

FATEMAH: I felt my heart would fall down from happiness like “Yes. Yes. We are now going. We are now going.:

BANA ALABED: When we reach there, my brothers say it is paradise. And we feel happy. We ate so much things because we was feeling very happy.

FATEMAH: And when we arrived to countryside, my children saw a lot of things that they dream it, like food and fruit and water and they thought that it is their heaven.

BANA ALABED: We it apple, banana, orange, like all of the fruits. It is the first time I ate chicken and I have a stomach ache, and I vomit because I ate fruit and chicken and bread. And I feel happy very much.

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FATEMAH: Dear Bana, I hope the homeland of your early years is imprinted on you and that you understand that wherever you are, the blood of you and the pride of our people runs throw you. Holding in your heart all that came before, Bana. It was beautiful.

BANA ALABED: I live in Turkey. Yes, and we are happy very much because we are in a safe country. Now I can go to school safe. I have a school. My brother have a school.

FATEMAH: Every day you still ask when we can go home. I hope that day will come that we will see a country that is rebuilt and people reborn.

BANA ALABED: When I grow up I will be a teacher teaching the children English because I wanted them to learn the alphabet and the word, how to write, how to read in Arabic and in English.

FATEMAH: Maybe you will have given me grandchildren by then. I always tell them stories about the war and how brave their mother was. How you never give up and how you made it your mission to help people. How you would spread a message of hope and peace. I will tell them that “your mother is a hero.” You are, Bana, and I am so proud to be your mother. I love you, Bonbon, more than you can ever know. Love. Mommy.

[Sound: Music]

AMT: Bana Alabed and her mother Fatemah Alabed. Bana's book is called Dear World: A Syrian girl's Story of War and Plea for Peace. That documentary was produced by The Current's Liz Hoath. Let us know what you were thinking as you were listening to that. Tweet as we are @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. In our next half hour, author Anne Applebaum takes us back to Joseph Stalin forced starvation of Ukraine in the early 1930s. The Red Famine and its echoes in the world today. In about 90 seconds. I'm Anna Maria. This is The Current.

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Why Washington Post's Anne Applebaum warned of the 'Ukrainization of American politics'

Guest: Anne Applebaum.

AMT: Hi I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current. We're remembering a forgotten famine in Ukraine.

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When the terrible conditions came, that is in December-January, the worst one in February ’33. There were a lot of people that have died. Every morning the wagon, corps wagon, was stopping at every house and shouting “anybody has died overnight”.

AMT: Mykola Latyshko survived the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s. He lived to share his memories as he did there with Ukrainian Canadian research and documentation center in Toronto. Five million of his fellow Ukrainians did not. It's an astonishing death toll, especially since the famine is probably better described as starvation, a forced starvation brought about by the Soviets. And as the present day conflict between Ukraine and Russia goes into its fourth year, looking back on the famine of 1932 to 1933 helps to eliminate the long bitter and bloody relationship between the two. That's just what Anne Applebaum has done for her new book. She's a Washington Post columnist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her earlier work Gulag: A History. Her latest is called Red Famine: Stalin's war on Ukraine. Anne Applebaum is with me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Hello.

AMT: Ukrainians call the famine the 'Holodomor'. What does that mean?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: It's a word that means death famine or terror famine and it was a word used to express the difference between the famine of the early 1930s and other previous famines.

AMT: Because it really was a death famine.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Because it was so massive and it touched so many people and it was so deadly.

AMT: What was the relationship between Ukraine and Russia before the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Ukraine had been in effect a colony of the Russian empire - part of the Russian empire for a couple of centuries and prior to that it had been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was also a kind of empire although it was much looser. Ukraine had always been to Russians a kind of almost like a more charming southern province, somewhere they knew was foreign but they didn't really acknowledge as being a place with its own identity. That relationship was always complicated by the fact that both Russia and Ukraine trace their origins back to a medieval state called Kievan Rus whose capital was of course Kiev. So Kiev was the kind of the originator of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. And so Russia felt a kind of ownership over Ukraine, as I said going back several hundred years.

AMT: And why did Joseph Stalin fear an independent Ukraine?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Well so in 1917, when the Russian Revolution took place, there was also a Ukrainian revolution. It was led by a group of Ukrainian national thinkers and intellectuals and they had a very different idea of what Ukraine should look like after 1917. They wanted an independent country they wanted - they were not Bolsheviks and Stalin feared them as a challenge to his power. You know Ukraine wasn't true to Stalin ever really a foreign country, and he couldn't stomach the idea that Ukraine would be somehow different would have a different government, that would somehow challenge the legitimacy of the Bolshevik state.

AMT: And so he does something with Ukrainian farms. What does he do?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So collectivization is a little bit later. This is in 1929-30, Stalin launches a kind of rural Revolution in Ukraine, actually all over the Soviet Union, forcing peasants off their land, forcing them to join a collective farms - state farms and a set of decisions which caused both a massive rebellion and also led to huge disorganization and chaos in all of Soviet agriculture but particularly in Ukraine.

AMT: And there's a man named Stepan Horlach who lived through the collectivization of the farms and he was also interviewed by the Ukrainian Canadian research and documentation center. And I've got a clip here. This is what he remembers about it.

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And that's why they made this process so collectivisation. So if you didn't want to give anything to [unintelligible] they will be taken by of force. Everything was taken by force. So they did with us, my family, my father was arrested just because he was not a supporter of this process of collectivisation. And not only he was arrested, but also they took everything what we had, threw us out of the house and took us this other Ukrainian [unintelligible].

AMT: Anne Applebaum, how did Joseph Stalin respond to those farmers who refused to go along with the collectivization process?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: He had them deported. He gave them a name he called them Kulaks a word that means rich peasants but eventually came to mean at really anybody who opposed Stalinism, and he had them he had them deported. He had them arrested. You know eventually many of them would die in exile.

AMT: So these are essentially family farmers.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: They are they were all family farmers and by modern standards they were all very poor.

AMT: Okay. And does it just trying to work the land and there they come along and they're told get in line or else. And then we just heard the or else there.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Yes that's correct.

AMT: And so when did the famine start?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So the famine begins in about 1931. The chaos of collectivization causes starvation all over the Soviet Union. But in the autumn of 1932 Stalin made a series of specific decisions that instead of alleviating the famine, which he at that point could have done. The [unintelligible] he could have brought. He could have asked for foreign aid as they had done in a previous Soviet famine in 1920. He could have stopped green requisitions, stopped demanding grain from the peasants. He could have stopped exporting grain. Instead of that, he passed a series of laws which deepened the famine specifically in Ukraine. So the Ukrainian towns and villages were blacklisted. A kind of cordon was put out around Ukraine so that people couldn't leave. Roadblocks were set up between the villages and the cities and then there were a series of searches. These were activist teams who went from house to house and they took not just grain, but everything. So they literally removed people's food. So people had nothing to eat and they were unable to leave. And so that was how a few months later they began to die and the death rates go spikes very high in the spring of 1933 in Ukraine.

AMT: And who does the peasantry blame for that hunger?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So at the time they blamed - some blamed outsiders, some blamed Russians, some blamed of the Soviet state.

AMT: And who was actually coming into the houses? They were Russians?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So the teams were usually mixed and they usually had one or two outsiders some were from Russia. They had activists from Russia, some were from Ukrainian cities and some of them were local people who were persuaded to collaborate. Some were hungry themselves and they wanted food to feed themselves and their families, some of them were afraid, some of them were moved by Soviet ideology.

AMT: So at the time Ukraine is the breadbasket of Eastern Europe. What happens to all the grain?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So some of the grain is requisitioned, some of it was never grown because of, as I said, the chaos in the countryside meant that people weren't sowing fields. Some of it is requisitioned and taken to Russia. So there is no - there is famine in some parts of rural Russia but there's no famine in the Russian cities at least not to the deadly extent that there was in Ukraine, and some grain even in that year - this really difficult year of 1932-33 is exported.

AMT: So give us an idea of what a day would be like in a typical Ukrainian village at the height of this famine.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Well at the height of the famine people were unable to move or speak. People would be lying in their houses or sometimes people would have tried to leave the village and so they would be lying by the sides of the road. There were people who tried to work because the peasants were paid on a kind of daily rate. They were given food if they appeared at work. And so some of them tried to work and would die in the fields. Children died often in schools. There were people who were saved in various ways, sometimes by teachers, sometimes by doctors. And there were if you had contacts with the local bureaucracy you could find ways out. But for people who didn't have those kind of contacts, eventually what famine what starvation does as your body begins to shut down very slowly and then of course you die.

AMT: And you have all sorts of accounts, you've gone back and you've looked at what people have written and what they have passed along, but you have these horrific stories of people with their children some of them killing their own children to save them. They they're all hungry they don't know what to do. I mean take us through some of the horrors of this time.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So of course the worst stories do involve children. There's a story of a woman putting her children outside far away and kind of burying them in the ground so that she wouldn't have to hear them cry because it was just so unbearable to have children who are starving. There are terrible stories about dead bodies going unburied for many days because there just weren't people who were strong enough in the villages to bury them. There are famously some terrible stories about cannibalism which was mostly not people killing other people, but people are eating dead bodies. And then there were lynchings of cannibals. So the community was horrified by cannibalism, even then. And cannibals would be chased down and killed. There were also terrible stories of theft. You know, so essentially what happens as your body breaks down, your sense of morality and community and your mind goes as well. And people who had lived blameless lives became thieves. They became criminals. They began to steal food and then their previously friendly neighbors would shoot them for stealing and so on. So you have a kind of almost total social breakdown all through the Ukrainian countryside at that time.

AMT: And you make the point as this famine advances and people become even more weak, they lose all will for the most part. They have no energy. They don't even know what to do.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So yeah at the height of the- you know, as you become- as you get close to death people stopped moving, stopped thinking you know would lie on the ground and beg or just lie on the ground.

AMT: Russia was a closed communist country at the time. It was known in the outside world about the famine in Ukraine.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So there were pockets of knowledge. There were people across the border in Poland who knew. There were some diplomats who knew. There were some of the Ukrainian diaspora even in Canada new from letters that they had from their families. But none of that knowledge ever rose to a higher level. So you know leaders of countries never discussed it in public. There was no public debate about it. Inside the Soviet Union there was no comment of it or discussion of it, ever actually, until the late 1980s.

AMT: And I want to ask you about Walter Duranty and the New York Times correspondent in Moscow at the time. He was in there for early to mid-30s. Is that right?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Yes. So Duranty was the New York Times correspondent [unintelligible] of the Moscow press core at the time and he certainly knew about the famine. There actually a British diplomat who records a conversation with him in which he talks about the famine but says yes. But Mr. Duranty has not decided to share this knowledge with his American readers. Duranty’s famous for having praised collectivization and praised Stalin although he is not left wing. He saw him as a modernizer and he transmitted that idea back to the United States where it was popular in the thirties, when people were looking for alternatives because of the Great Depression. When the Famine happened he not only didn't write about it he actually actively suppressed it when it was described by another journalist- a young Welshman named Gareth Jones who very bravely walked through the heart of Ukraine during the height of the famine and kept elaborate notebooks. Duranty dismissed his work and said “well, this nice young man has made this great effort but he hasn't, you know, he hasn't he hasn't really seen the Soviet Union. He doesn't know anything.” So Duranty part of the active cover up.

AMT: And if I'm not mistaken he makes an appearance in your earlier book on Gulag, too, in terms of his reporting. He looked the other way on the Soviet Gulag, did he not, Duranty?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Yes. He was not keen to advertise Soviet terror. I think it was probably mostly out of vanity because his name had been made and his Pulitzer had been won actually in 1931 on the back of his praise for the Soviet Union.

AMT: Okay and so he just didn't want to go off on that.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: He didn't want to go take it back. No.

AMT: In the aftermath of the famine, how free were Ukrainians to speak about it during the time Ukraine was under Soviet control?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Ukrainians never spoke about it in public under Soviet control. As I said until the very very end. People did speak about it in their families and they passed down recollections of the famine from one generation to the next. I have lots of Ukrainian friends who remember their mothers or grandmothers describing it to them. But the first time it was ever mentioned in public, was after the Chernobyl accident in 1986, when a famous Ukrainian poet got up and made an explicit comparison between the secrecy that had surrounded Chernobyl and the secrecy that had surrounded the famine. He said the secrecy is what's killing us Ukrainians.

AMT: So all of that time under Soviet influence Ukrainians were afraid and with good reason.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Certainly they were afraid. And of course by the end there were many who didn't know about it, from whom this was the story was kept secret.

AMT: There were many others though who kept the memory of those times alive. How did they do that?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: People did it through- They kept they had kept notebooks. They showed their children. They discussed it with their children. A very important part of the story is that the Diaspora. When Ukrainians left the Soviet Union at the end of the war, a significant number were able to do, and then they got out into the Western Europe and North America. They began preserving the famines stories. They began writing them up in books and pamphlets. They sometimes collected oral history. They collected memoirs. So there was a real attempt out in North America, particularly here in Canada, to preserve some of those memories.

AMT: Now since 2014, Russia has been fighting a not so proxy war with Ukraine. Thousands of people have been killed. What's the connection between today's conflict and the famine of the 30s?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: I think that Putin has the same phobia that Stalin had about Ukraine. You know he sees Ukraine not it is not a foreign country to him it's not even, you know, just another province or another neighbor. He sees it as you know a Ukrainian government that was that would be democratic or European or somehow integrated with the West and not part of the Russian sphere of influence. He perceives this as an existential threat. Stalin also saw Ukraine as an existential threat and that he used the famine to get rid of this Ukrainian problem because he perceived it as a threat to the Bolsheviks. And I think Putin sees Ukraine in a in a similar way.

AMT: It's so interesting because if you talk to Ukrainians in this country, Ukraine sees itself as very much a separate entity and has its own sense of self.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: I think Putin made a mistake about Ukraine. I think when he invaded Eastern Ukraine he expected eastern Ukrainians, because they're Russian speaking, to simply rise up and join him. And that didn't happen because of course there are Russian speaking Ukrainians, as there are Ukrainian speaking Ukrainians and they have a different sense of themselves now. They don't think of themselves as being part of Putin's Russia.

AMT: How does Russia today think about the famine in Ukraine?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: The famine is not a topic in Russian public debate. I doubt many Russians know about it, to the extent that Russian historians deal with it. They have sought either to downplay it or to deny that there was any special Ukrainian aspect to the wider Soviet famine.

AMT: And how does Ukraine teach about the famine today?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: It is an important part now. It is in the Ukrainian curriculum. There are famine memorials all over Ukraine. In some cases, to some degree it's become a little bit of a political football in Ukraine that sort of the more – The national movement has sought to put a lot of emphasis on the famine. The pro-Russian presidents like Yanukovych, the one who was chased out in 2014, has sought to downplay the role of the famine. So it has become, as I explained in the book and I could lay out this complicated process, it has become a political issue in Ukraine.

AMT: Do you think that this famine and the actions of Joseph Stalin amounted to genocide?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So I think according to the original definition of genocide, there's no question that it does, in that it was an attempt to destroy Ukraine culturally, to weaken it. Ukrainian peasants were were deliberately targeted by a campaign, as I said. It was not accidental starvation. It was deliberate starvation. People's food was removed from their homes and they were prevented from leaving. Under international law, it might be harder to classify it as a genocide because we've come to define the term more narrowly, and we think of it as being you know an attempt to kill everybody in a single ethnic group and it was not that. But international law is whatever the nations of the world decide it is. And so if the famine if people would like to define genocide more broadly then of course it is clearly evidence of a state attempt to use terror to murder its own people.

AMT: You know and as we talk about this Ukraine and Russia and that whole relationship is front and center in the news with the United States, because former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and an associate had been indicted by independent counsel Robert S. Mueller. There is a Ukrainian connection. What do we know about the relationship between a Manafort and the Putin government in Russia and Ukraine?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Manafort was working on behalf of the pro-Russian parties and the pro-Russian candidates in Ukraine, and that meant he was working on behalf of the Russian attempt to use corruption, violence and thuggery to undermine independent Ukraine. Actually when he was nominated to be - appointed to be Trump's campaign manager I wrote an article saying this could bring the Ukrainianization of American politics and the use of violent rhetoric and online social media campaigns designed to divide people and thuggery and violent political meetings and of course that is exactly what happened.

AMT: And so I guess you're watching unfold what you thought you would see unfold. How do you think President Putin views these arrests, then?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So Putin may have overplayed his hand at the U.S. election. I don't know whether he knows that or not, but one of the effects of the deep Russian involvement with man of Ford and with several other people in the Trump campaign is that it's made the U.S. Congress very wary of any trump warming of relations with Russia. And so actually Trump is very constrained towards Russia in a way that he might not have been otherwise.

AMT: So in other words all of this may have worsened relations in a way that Putin did not anticipate.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So there's no question that it's worsened relations. There's no question that it's made people- It's made the Russian American relationship unusual and fraught in a way that it wouldn't have been otherwise.

AMT: I want to ask you about North Korea and Russia under Stalin, do you see any similarities between those two regimes?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So the one state in the world that is most similar to Stalin's Russia is today's North Korea. That seems to be run in a very similar way and I think that's probably not accidental because it was a state whose concentration camps for example were probably set up with the advice of Soviet Soviet advisers in the 1950s. And it acts and thinks very much like a paranoid- a like a modern paranoid version of the Soviet Union of the 1940s. It seems very similar even to the extent of having had a famine and having an extensive system of labor camps.

AMT: After the famine in the 1990s in North Korea.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Yes there was a famine. I mean famines are always political in the sense that there's always food somewhere. And so if people don't have it in one particular place there's a political explanation for it. But in the case of Communist regimes they very often seem to be directed at particular populations or designed to achieve some kind of political goal.

AMT: So how important is it for us to understand the Ukrainian famine today with what's playing out geopolitically?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So I think the Ukrainian famine is essential background both for understanding the nature of today’s Ukraine and for understanding the relationship of Ukraine and Russia. If you want to know what's the source of this strange competition. Why Ukrainians are so - I want to use the word paranoid but of course not really paranoia but why they're so afraid of Russia. If you want to know why Russians have this strange anger towards Ukraine, you really need to understand this background.

AMT: And it really is playing out in the memories of people we know today. And this has all been carried forward. It is a terrible terrible story.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: No the effects of the famine go on. They shaped you know - the famine was accompanied also by the destruction of Ukraine's leadership class its intellectuals and the effects of that we have and you know second and third generation even today.

AMT: Thank you for your work.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Thank you.

AMT: Anne Applebaum book is called Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine. She joined us in our Toronto studio. Let us know what you think of what she's saying and how she connects the dots to the Russia Ukraine conflict today. You can tweet us we are @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. And this is The Current on CBC Radio One. Coming up tomorrow, the CBC's Julie Ireton brings us a documentary about retired workers from the Atomic Energy of Canada limited AECL. In 1958, disaster struck at their Chalk River facility. Mechanical failure led to a fire and the spread of radioactive dust. It took hundreds of men and several weeks to clean up that hazardous mess. Now these men are telling their story in an attempt to correct an injustice around compensation.

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VOICE 1: Of course I was a rookie two years there. So I said “I'll go.”

VOICE 2: My name is George Philip Kiley. And I started at- I am 85 and I started the Atomic Energy and first of August 1956. And I retired fifth of August 1987, after 31 years.

VOICE 3: 1958 was a human error and partly failed safety system.

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ANCHOR: These are [unintelligible] uranium fuel [unintelligible] caused fire as after it was removed from the reactor.

VOICE 1: Workers in plasti-suits, rubber, rubber gloves and they wore fresh air masks. We had to make sure that they were protected before they went in under the reactor.

VOICE 2: And they were looking for volunteers. So they came around in our building, 465 [unintelligible] building across the road from 100. And they asked for volunteers to go in help on the clean up. So I went over and they guys dressed me up for protection, put pencils on me to read the radiation. And they explained to me like what's going on “you're going to have a long vacuum tube. And we've sprayed in there so these little particles are gonna play little pellets and. The idea is to try and pick up as many of those pellets as you can. And you won't be able to stay in there very long. And we'll keep track here.”

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AMT: We will bring you Juilie Ireton’s documentary 10 minutes of Work, tomorrow. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio 1 for q. It is Halloween of course and Tom power will be joined by John Carpenter the filmmaker and composer behind the cult classic movie Halloween. You can keep up with The Current Q and all your favorite CBC Radio programs with the CBC Radio app. Download it for free from the App Store or Google Play. We're going to end things off this October 31st with some spooky music as well. This is Run-DMC’s hip hop version of the Ghostbusters’ theme song from 1989. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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