← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC Radio 4
00:28:14
Why some pro-democracy candidates in Burma won't be contesting the forthcoming Pascale...
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Hi there.
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You've downloaded the BBC Radio programme from our own correspondent.
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We make two versions and if you'd like to hear our World Service programme, you'll find it on the BBC iplayer.
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This, though, is the edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
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It's presented by Kate Ady.
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Today, the campaigners for democracy in Burma who won't be taking part in the first elections in 20 years. Police in Kashmir turn on the journalists trying to tell the story of anti Indian unrest. We discover the pain is worse for immigrants as Spain continues to struggle in the economic downturn. And some helpful hints for anyone planning to ship grandmother's chest of drawers to Algeria. Burma is preparing to hold elections on November 7, amid criticism from pro democracy activists and Western governments that the poll will not be free, fair or inclusive. The best known opposition figure, Aung San Suu Kyi, whose party, the NLD, won the last election back in 1990, is not allowed to stand this time because she's under house arrest. The Burmese authorities rarely allow in working BBC journalists, so we're not naming our correspondent who's gone in undercover. She's discovered that there are bitter divisions within opposition circles over how best to approach the coming pollution.
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Nian Nguyen is a remarkably jovial, cheery man, but every now and then his outer armor of determined optimism slips. Nianwyn is the spokesman for the National League for Democracy, or NLD, the political party led by Aung San Suu Kyi. He's also Ms. Suu Kyi's lawyer. For years, he's been the conduit through which Burma's most famous political prisoner has delivered her messages to the outside world. And for years, he's been a key contact for journalists trying to find out what's going on in a country where information is strictly controlled and where reporters in general and BBC reporters in particular are not welcome. Reporters like me. But now here I was in Rangoon, perched on the corner of a bed, with Ngan Nguyen sitting opposite me on a wooden chair, dressed in traditional Burmese longi and crisp white shirt. We'd arrange to meet at a safe location, arriving from different directions and at different times, to try to minimise the chances of being followed. Me being followed, that is. Nianwyn is followed wherever he goes. Is it obvious? I ask him, when we finally meet. Oh, yes, he says, dissolving into wry giggles. Every morning I come out of my house and say good morning to the three men who are there. Then they ask where I'm going. I say, you know, I won't tell you. They smile, and then they follow. This is how it is, he says. The people of Burma have got used to living under a military dictatorship. They've known nothing else for the best part of half a century. But in the bustling tea shops, where men and women sit on tiny, brightly coloured plastic stools sipping the strong, sweet liquid which seems to sustain everybody, you can sense a new level of anxiety, of uncertainty about the future. The ruling generals have called elections, the first for 20 years. But the NLD is boycotting the process. The party which has been at the vanguard of fighting for freedom and democracy in Burma, the party which won the last poll in 1990 but was never allowed by the generals to assume power. The party whose members have been imprisoned for their political beliefs. That party will not be on the ballot paper. New election laws state that serving prisoners cannot stand as candidates or be members of political parties. Which means Aung San SUU Kyi can't run. Her party refuses to run without her. The election process, the NLD argues, is fatally flawed, skewed so much in favour of the current military elite that it will be a sham. Many other pro democracy activists and foreign governments agree. But some opposition groups are throwing their hats in the ring, including, controversially, a breakaway faction of the nld. They've formed a new party called the NDF to contest the election. It was when I mentioned the NDF that Nianwyn's face changed. The cheery demeanour fell away. He briefly looked down at the floor, as if collecting his thoughts. When he looked back up, his eyes seemed to have gone a shade darker. They're a splinter, he said, only a splinter of the nld. The sense of resentment, of something close to betrayal, was palpable. The feeling was just as strong, though perhaps leaning more towards hurt than anger, when I met the chairman of the breakaway party. Tan Yen is a former political prisoner. Now in his 70s and in poor health, he's a highly respected elder statesman within the democracy movement. He spoke slowly, thoughtfully and yet with great passion. It's our duty to carry on the democratic movement within the legal fold, he told me. He and his colleagues are determined to offer voters some kind of choice. But Tan Yen said, choosing his words carefully, unfortunately, our old colleagues who have a different opinion than us, they're urging our grassroots level activists not to join us. As I headed to the airport in the back of a rickety taxi, the only kind there is in Rangoon, the implication of Tan Yen's words preyed on my in less than a month, Burma's long suffering people will be asked to vote for the first time in 20 years. No one under the age of 38 has ever voted in an election before. Critics say the poll will merely provide a civilian cloak for continued military rule. Others say, however flawed the election could be a first tentative step towards meaningful change. One thing, however, seems Even before a single vote has been cast, the election has bitterly divided the movement which once united by the struggle for freedom and democracy. I left Burma with the strange but lingering feeling that I'd witnessed the fallout of a tragic family feud.
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Spain is one of the European countries hit hardest by the global economic downturn, and the country's immigrant population is being hit harder than most. The unemployment rate among immigrants In Spain is 30%, compared to the national average of 20%, and many are claiming benefits to get by. This has led to calls from some politicians for immigrants to leave Spain and go back home. But Pascal Harta in Barcelona is wondering what this anxiety is really about, the economy or the changes which a large influx of migrants has brought to Spanish culture?
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Immigrants who can't find work should go home now, Jose Luis Roberto tells me. He's the president of the political party Espana 2000. But I wonder if it's not the lack of jobs but what he says next. That's the real reason he wants immigrants to leave. We don't want Muslims here who don't integrate and whose religion is incompatible with Spanish culture. Espana 2000 may be a small party with only three candidates elected to council level and only 3,000 members nationwide, but its views can't be dismissed. The rate of immigration into Spain over the last few years has been extreme, not just for the numbers, although during the boom half a million migrants were arriving every year. But because it's been so sudden. In 1999, Spain was a country with barely any immigrants at all. Today they make up 12% of the population. Moroccans form the second largest immigrant group here. Many of them are young men who've come to Spain alone. They're not part of the drinking and flirtation that's so much a feature of Spanish social life. They're under schooled and under skilled, so they stand little chance of finding employment in the current downturn. I'm not saying Spain is racist, says Mustafa Hassan. He's worked here for 14 years. He has married and had children in Spain, and even though he hasn't been able to find work for a year now, he says he can't even consider going back to Morocco. Spain is his country, and I can hear it in the easy colloquial way he speaks the language. His every gesture is utterly Spanish. So frimo junto Spanish people can't find work either, he says. We're all suffering together. I met Mustafa in a bar in Ellejido in the south. He was having a coffee, waiting for his number to come up in the unemployment queue. Bars play a particular role in Spanish life. Local bars are the linchpin of the community, so perhaps they're a useful measure of how much immigration is changing Spain. The bar is where workmen go for a cognac at 6am By 5 to 11, clean coffee cups and saucers line the tables, ready for the white collar workers who descend from the surrounding office blocks and are back at their desks five minutes later, leaving the bar deserted but for stained cups and cigarette butts. When my family came to visit me in Barcelona, I had to introduce them to Juan, the owner of my local bar. Not to have done so would have been rude. It was Juan who fed me for free. When I locked myself out of the flat without my wallet, it was Juan who got a ladder and climbed through the open window to let me back in. I knew he was struggling during the recession, but when I came back from a work trip and found his bar closed for good, I wasn't the only one on the street to be horrified. Juan's bar has been replaced by a clothes shop you find on high streets all over the world. Spain had changed anyway, with the economic liberalisation and investment that came with membership of the European Union. Spanish shoppers have forsaken the open air markets for the French owned supermarket chain Carrefour. And it's sad you don't tend to talk to people at the supermarket checkout. You can't help but get caught up in conversation in the market, though, there's always an old lady in front of you in the queue, inspecting a cut of meat to cook for her son's visit. He's a doctor, you know, she'll say, before giving the stall owner and the rest of the queue a full description of his house, his job, his beautiful children, and an aside about the wife who's not quite good enough. When I first lived here in 1995, everyone went to the market. In the handful of supermarkets there were then in Barcelona, there wasn't a single brand name I could recognize. Now the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who've set up shops all over the city stock PG Tips tea and Heinz Baked Beans. Despite the speed with which the immigrant community has grown, there has also been rapid, deep integration. And the bar I started going to when Juan's bar closed is proof. It's staffed by one Filipino and two Bangladeshis who run the gamut of local greetings as if they'd been born here. Hola nena, they say, greeting everyone in Catalan slang. In another bar run by Chinese immigrants, the owner's children pester the customers for help with their Catalan homework. The customers don't seem to mind. This is, after all, their local neighbourhood bar, the centre of goings on. It's the global boom and bust, not the immigrants threatening the Spanish way of life. An old man at the bar tells me, and I have to agree.
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And that was Pascal Harter. The news emerging from Indian Administered Kashmir over the last few months hasn't been good. Anti government and anti India demonstrations have been suppressed with considerable force. More than a hundred people, many of them teenagers, have been killed. It's a region where Indian rule has never been fully accepted. And as Chris Morris has been finding out, local journalists trying to report on the story have become targets themselves.
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When I met Farouk Shah, he was lying under a blanket in the corner of his living room in obvious discomfort. Friends and neighbours were sitting on cushions scattered across the floor. Someone was serving tea and biscuits. Farouk had a broken arm and stitches on his head. The previous evening, when he'd heard that curfew had been relaxed, he'd made the mistake of wandering down to the main road at the end of his lane. The police were beating passersby with long wooden sticks, he recalled. He told them he was a journalist, a photographer with a local newspaper, Rising Kashmir. So they beat him too. It's been a long, hard summer for journalists who ply their trade amidst the beguiling beauty of the Kashmir Valley. They've had to cover the deaths of civilians from their own communities while dodging bullets, rocks and tear gas shells. Months of street clashes have seen more than a hundred young men lose their lives, nearly all of them shot dead by the police. And for some time now, the police have been turning on the people who are telling this story to the world. Curfew passes have been ignored or torn up. Journalists have been threatened and intimidated, and the national press in India hasn't paid a great deal of attention. The BBC hasn't been immune. Our Urdu service reporter, Ries Masrur, was beaten earlier this year, a hairline fracture on his arm courtesy of of a police baton. And last week, the latest victim, Mehrujahdin, a veteran TV cameraman working for the Associated Press, was trying to reach the State assembly with his son Omar, another cameraman. The police ignored their passes, and when they protested, the blows came raining down. Mehrujuddin took one on the side of the neck, which left him lying in a heap on the road. There seem to be plenty of people in the valley who don't want the local media to get their stories out. TV news channels have been taken off air and newspapers have been prevented from publishing or distributing for weeks at a time. Vendors have been threatened and copies seized from street corners. The chief minister says it's nothing to do with him, which begs the question, who's running the show? I've covered Kashmir for more than 20 years, said a leading local journalist, Shujad Bukhari, and I've never seen such restrictions. For us, the last three months has been the worst period ever. Efforts to suppress the news haven't really worked. Newspapers have been out every day online and social networking sites have been alive with angry debate. Still, the campaign against the news providers seems to be continuing. And that's sad, because there have been positive developments in Kashmir. Recently, an all party delegation from Delhi visited Srinagar to listen to local complaints and suggestions. As a result, people detained for throwing stones have been released from custody, and now a number of police posts and bunkers in the center of the city have been dismantled and removed. Confidence building measures, they say. It's been pretty obvious for some time that the overbearing security presence in Srinagar had become counterproductive. The militant insurgency of the early 1990s has long gone, but at times it seems as if the authorities haven't got the message. Armed police stand guard at every corner, enforcing curfew, searching bags and acting as a visible reminder for the weary local population. Life here isn't normal. I spent an hour or so at one police post in the Old Town a few weeks ago. Sandbags and barbed wire surrounding a pretty ramshackle hut. Stones thrown by teenage protesters were rattling off tin rooftops and bouncing into the shattered shop fronts of an empty street. Not desperately threatening, but a constant irritation. It's their game, sighed the policeman on duty, staring down a rubble strewn back lane at the silhouettes of the stone pelters. It's like this every day. So what would happen if you weren't here? I asked. They'd probably be playing cricket instead, he replied. Problem solved. If only Kashmir as a whole were that simple. It isn't, and it's been a tough time for everyone in the valley over the last few months. But blaming the local media isn't part of the solution. Don't shoot the messenger. And don't beat him up either.
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Chris Morris President Obama has spent the last couple of days in Chicago trying to make sure his old Senate seat doesn't fall into the hands of the Republicans. It isn't just a series of scandals which have undermined the Democrats in Illinois, but a sense of voter dissatisfaction that's been growing in states throughout the Union. Those voters get to have their say in the midterm elections on November 2. Opinion polls suggest the Republicans could win majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Mark Mardell has been examining the reasons for the electorate's feverish mood.
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A forlorn yellow balloon is trapped by the sky, unable to rise any further. It's stuck against the deep blue heavens and the fluffy white clouds Gondolas Circle St. Mark's Square below. It's a very American illusion, for I am in one of Las Vegas palace of Dreams, the huge Venetian hotel, where a narcotically vivid sky has been craftily painted on the vast ceiling which arches way above my head. The hotel casino seems busy enough, music blaring, lights glaring. But like the balloon, the city's economy nowadays has trouble rising to its accustomed heights. Those of a censorious disposition might find it fitting that this city, devoted to the illusion of sudden, undeserved wealth, is nestled in the desert embrace of Nevada. This state has the unpleasant distinction of having the worst economy in the usa, which is why the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, Harry Reid, a Nevada senator for 24 years, may well lose his seat when America votes on November 2nd. It's a fate that may befall many of his less illustrious colleagues as well. For Nevada is not alone. All over the United States, you pass the depressing sight of boarded up homes and businesses. A recent government report showed the recession ended in the summer of 2009. All over the US I've heard the same baleful joke. Shame no one told the economy it's the economy, stupid is perhaps the most overworked cliche in politics. But it still counts as an insight here, because politicians, particularly those on the right, have often focused on cultural issues abortion, guns, homosexuality, evolution, Islam instead of the bread and butter issues. But Republicans may capitalise on the mood of economic unease in the nation because of the boiling enthusiasm of the Tea Party movement. Its members have a sense of anger, a disgust that they've been let down, and a near absolute distrust of government. And they know it's the economy, stupid. This vibrant, anarchic and furious ginger group of conservatives has pushed the Republican Party to adopt their people and their policies. One activist did not demur when I compared their tactics to Trotskyites who attempted to take over the British Labour party in the 1980s. Exactly, he said. The core of what the Tea Party is about is smaller government, less spending and as a consequence, lower tax. But it's big government that's the real enemy. It isn't just bad policies, but a feeling that government in itself is almost evil, an assault on freedom. So here there's a great paradox. A movement that boasts its theoretical love of America and democracy, but which hates its real life institutions. It's not their fairly mainstream economic theories I strain to understand, but the passion. A passion which means that political discourse has become increasingly uncivil, filled with vitriol and abuse. So why is the Tea Party boiling? Some say it's racism. Those I've met are not racist. But I do wonder if for some, there's a sense of lost superiority. For all their lives, there's been a white man in the White House. It's not just that Obama isn't in this image. He doesn't fit any stereotype of a black person that they know. Cool, cosmopolitan, calm and aloof. There's a sense of disconnect for what ought to be their view of the natural order. A woman who told me that Obama was a socialist and her country was sliding into Marxism said when he was elected president, she drew the curtains for three weeks and couldn't answer the telephone. Only the Tea Party saved her. America is changing fast. And some in the Tea Party don't like the loss of the assumption that that white European 1950s America is the norm. The benchmark. Americans bang on a lot about being American. There's an intense patriotism, a belief the United States has a unique place in the world and its actions have just about always been for the good. There's perhaps today a somewhat puzzling lack of self confidence in this, the richest and most powerful country the world has ever known. Perhaps it's because for many, it's a country that was born with a purpose, a mission, a dream. And if their particular notion of that dream is questioned, it feels as unnatural and as artificial as that Venice sky in Vegas stopping the yellow balloon from rising. We British can look back far into our past history to Alfred the Great, perhaps even King Arthur. But American history has very shallow roots. To the rest of us, America looks robust. But American conservatives believe they're nurturing a fragile dream. The American novelist of the moment, Jonathan Franzen, perhaps sums it up aptly in his new bestseller, when he says, the personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour to misanthropy and rage.
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Mark Mardell Foreign correspondents do, we hope, know rather a lot about the region, the country where they're based. But they may have other, less obvious talents, too. They tend to be good people. To ask about shipping household effects around the world. A career spent moving self, family and home from country to country leaves one well versed in the ways of shipping companies, bureaucracy and in how to dodge seemingly intractable logistical difficulties. Seven months ago, Chloe Arnold in Algiers was sent a small consignment of furniture from London. It should have been a straightforward process, the shippers told her. Present a few documents to customs, then go and collect the shipment. But as she soon discovered, it wasn't quite as easy as that.
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This is the tale of my grandmother's chest of drawers, the battered old desk at which I revised for my A levels, a chair, a mirror and a laundry basket. The story includes heroes and villains, a ship that sails from Felixstowe, a mayor or two, a dank and cavernous warehouse and about two miles of bubble wrap. Back in March, my mother telephoned from London to tell me she was sending me some furniture. My grandmother died three years ago and her possessions needed a new home. I'm not sure that's a good idea, I told her. Algeria is renowned for its red tape. It took me 15 months to get a work permit. Nonsense, darling, my mother said.
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You.
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You love a challenge. And besides, I've already bubble wrapped it. Before I arrived in Algeria, I imagined security would be the biggest issue. The country's emerging from a decade of bloodshed and Al Qaeda are said to run their North African operation from mountains near the capital. No, the biggest headache day to day is bureaucracy. Every aspect of living here involves acres of paperwork. 10. To get a residence permit, I had to provide 17 different documents, 12 photos and a chest X ray. Every document then has to be stamped and legalised at the mayor's office, a five storey glass building in the centre of Algiers which does a roaring trade. It isn't really Algeria's fault it has so much red tape. It's a system they inherited from their French colonisers who ruled until 1962, to which they've added the Soviet version. Algeria aligned itself with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but to get back to the furniture, it set sail from Felixstowe in April. Destination Algiers. By then, dockers at the port here had gone on strike and new laws were brought in to combat contraband and to stop European countries dumping goods past their sell by date on Algeria. So spring turned to summer. Roses and bougainvillea bloomed across the capital. Schools closed for the holidays and families headed for the beaches. But every time I rang jihad at the shipping company to find out what was happening, he said he needed a few more days. He was preparing documents. To be fair, importing anything to Algeria is well nigh impossible, and people I know who run businesses here have stopped bothering. There's the woman who runs the patisserie around the corner, which sells delicious caramel and pine nut tarts. Where do you get your pine nuts? I asked her. I bring them in from Spain, 10 kilos at a time in my suitcase. She told me her chocolate comes in the same way. Every time friends travel to Europe, she begs them to bring back ingredients in their luggage. Even state owned companies are suffering, I've been told A gas generator for the city of Boumadez has been sitting in the port for over a year, waiting to clear customs. If the national gas company can't get its generator through, what hope for my furniture? Summer turned to autumn. The holy month of Ramadan came and went. The roses gave way to jasmine and children headed back to school. I was summoned to the customs office, where the man in charge spelled it out to me. Madame Arnold, your shipment's been at our depot for three months. You owe 75,000 dinars. That's £750 in penalty charges. And if you don't retrieve it before the end of October, you'll have to renew all your documents. He told me if I left it in the warehouse, he said, it would be put up for auction. I could see him now, feet up on my desk, my grandmother's chest in the corner, stuffed full of customs certificates. And then my luck changed. I hired a customs broker, a gentleman in his 60s with wispy white hair. He scrutinized my dossier and told me he'd take care of it. All we need is a change of residence certificate from your mayor in the UK and we can get your things out. He said he settled for a letter from the British Embassy. I said I thought the Mayor of London might be a little busy. And last week we trailed off to a giant warehouse near the airport, where they tracked my furniture down to a dusty, mothball ridden corner. A bumpy lorry ride later, my furniture's been unwrapped and I'm writing this. At my battered old desk behind me stands my grandmother's chest of drawers. It's lost both its back feet, but it survived against the odds. This story does have a happy ending.
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And with Chloe Arnold finally surrounded by home comforts, we've reached the end of another edition. I'll be back next week on both Thursday and Saturday with more from our own correspondence. I do hope you'll join us. Goodbye.