← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
2 Feb, 2012
00:28:11
A rich seam of frustration - over poverty, bad leadership and corruption -- is being...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent. You can hear the version of the programme broadcast on the World Service by following the link to the iplayer on the top of our website.
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To keep up with our latest reports
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and get a sneak preview of the stories, you can sign up to our
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Twitter feed as well.
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But now, with the edition Broadcast on
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Radio 4, here's Kate Ady Today.
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How poverty, bad leadership and corruption are helping the militants find new recruits in northern Nigeria. Why Italy's working for a new relationship with Libya after the death of Colonel Gaddafi. A train journey through southern Africa offers glorious scenery, but also a close up of poverty and hardship. And we take shelter from the cold. In Vienna, in the cafe where Leon Trotsky was a regular. An air force barracks, a police station and an army checkpoint are among the latest targets attacked by gunmen in the northeast of Nigeria. Police there say the insurgent group known as Boko Haram is responsible for this week's violence in which at least six people lost their lives. The militants say they're fighting to impose Sharia law in this country of 160 million, roughly split between Christians and Muslims. They've been blamed for dozens of bombings and shootings in the northern semi desert regions of Nigeria. And Andrew Harding tells us the insurgents now enjoy considerable support among sections of the population dissatisfied with their rul.
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It's pitch dark and we're driving down an empty Nigerian motorway at high speed. The motorway is brand new and judging from all the swerving we're doing, not quite finished. I start imagining a half built bridge emerging from the gloom. Instead, abruptly, there's a big intersection on the outskirts of the capital, Abuja. No traffic lights, no clear right of way, but lots of approaching headlights. Our driver Kendi grunts and accelerates. Welcome to Nigeria, a hurtling place allergic to half measures. Economic growth, oil traffic, terrorism, music, corruption. Everything here seems larger and usually louder than life. We've just come from a small city called Jos, about five hours drive from Abuja. I counted more than 20 police and army checkpoints on the way, some big and quite reassuring, others nothing more than a branch on the road, an oil lamp, long shadows and guns pointing at the bonnet. All this is part of the Nigerian government's big, expensive new security operation across the north of the country, an attempt to crush an increasingly deadly militant Islamist group called Boko Haram. The group has been around on and off for the past decade and consists, in a magpie sort of way, of all kinds of grudges Causes and aims Boko Haram seems to have forged links with Al Qaeda's affiliates in the region. It's attacked churches and called for all Christians to leave northern Nigeria. But its main target is the state itself and particularly the heavy handed police. It's mining a rich seam of frustration about poverty, bad leadership and corruption, which is why Boko Haram is evidently finding it so easy to fill the power vacuum and to recruit in the dusty, impoverished towns of the north. For years, the city of Jos has been at the heart of the complicated tensions between north and South, Christians and Muslims, and a variety of competing tribes.
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Tribes.
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It's a noisy, cluttered place set on a high plateau surrounded by volcanoes and dark, eccentric rock formations. We found a church packed with families seeking sanctuary from Boko Haram. They just arrived en masse from a nearby town, looking surprisingly well dressed but extremely anxious. The Muslims don't want us there, said one woman. After the shooting started, we ran. Surely not all Muslims, I suggested. But the group's leader, a reverend, declared that the whole religion was to blame for not condemning Boko Haram loudly enough. It was a Friday, and at the nearby mosque I watched guards frisk the crowds coming in for prayers. Of course we condemn Boko Haram, said the community spokesman. After all, they've killed more Muslims than Christians. But the militants are a symptom of our problems here. Too many young men with no jobs or education. That night, on the dark drive back from Jos, we heard the news that another city, Kano, had just been attacked by Boko Haram. A spectacular, ambitious, well planned operation that left about 200 people dead. Need petrol, need food. Our driver grunted as we prepared for another long journey. A couple of days later, we were tearing through Kano, chasing the tail of a heavily armed convoy. The president had come to town to inspect the extensive damage. Goodluck. Jonathan is a Christian from the deep south of Nigeria, and although the security precautions were probably necessary, they gave his brief visit the appearance of an incursion into enemy territory. President Jonathan told me Boko Haram would and could be defeated. Perhaps he's right. Nigeria may be prone to extremes, but plenty of insurrections have come and gone. There is a. A resilience here. Kano has the look and feel of a small town, but it has a population of 9 million. As we were driving out, we slowed slightly at a roundabout. Suddenly, a teenage boy threw himself across the bonnet and started trying to clean the windscreen in the hope of earning a few coins. True to form, our driver accelerated and swerved, sending the boy sliding off the side to land on his feet like a gymnast on the road behind us.
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And that's Andrew Harding. It's a hundred years now since Italian troops marched into Libya claiming they were liberating the then tiny population from the yoke of the Ottoman Empire. Today the Italians have their eyes on Libyan oil and gas, while the new rulers in this North African country are looking across the Mediterranean for help in rebuilding their shattered nation. David Willie in Rome says the fall of Colonel Gaddafi has provided Italy with an opportunity to revamp its relationship with its former comm.
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The links between Italy and its former North African territory go back not only to the brief 36 years of colonial rule at the beginning of the 20th century, but to a much remoter past, nearly two millennia to be exact. In the Italian capital, the triumphal arch erected by Septimius Severus, the first African born Roman emperor. He was born in Libya and died in York during a military expedition to Britain, still dominates the ruins of the Roman forum. Libya in antiquity, a much more fertile, less desertic land than today, used to be Rome's breadbasket. When Mario Monti, Italy's new technocrat prime minister, spent a day in Tripoli last month attempting to sort out future relations with Libya's new transitional government, he presented the Libyans with an ancient marble bust of Domitilia, the wife of yet another Roman emperor, Vespasian. The bust was dug up somewhere along the North African coast by Italian archaeologists and stolen from a Libyan Museum in 1990. The sculpture turned up recently at an art auction in London. It was recognized by a vigilant policeman specialising in art theft and it's now been returned to its rightful owners as a kind of pledge that the Italians want good relations with the new Libya. Classical archaeology was used as a propaganda weapon by the Italians when they first occupied Cyrenaica and Tripolitania at the beginning of the 20th century and this continued after Libya became their colony during Fascist rule. Mussolini wanted to reoccupy the North African lands which for centuries had formed the southern boundary of the Roman Empire. The first systematic excavations at the site of Septimius Severus birthplace, Leptis Magna to took place during those years. The vast honey coloured stone remains of Leptis on the Mediterranean shore, visited only by handfuls of official guests during the Gaddafi years, are one of the wonders of the Mediterranean. But of course Italy's main interest today isn't in helping the Libyans protect their archaeological heritage and treasures. It's about trade and about oil and natural Gas. Before the Benghazi uprising last year, Italy had a cosy commercial relationship with Colonel Gaddafi. Eni, Italy's state owned oil company, enjoyed valuable long term oil concessions both in the Sahara Desert and for the future, offshore. And 25% of Italy's oil and gas needs were supplied by her former colony. A treaty of eternal friendship had been signed between Silvia Berlusconi and Muammar Gaddafi in 2008. The Italians publicly apologized for their misdeeds of an earlier era when tens of thousands of Libyans, no one knows exactly how many, died in concentration camps or were massacred by Italian troops during land grabs in North Africa. The core of the treaty was an Italian promise to build and pay for a new superhighway across the Libyan desert all the way from Tunisia to Egypt. Well, all this fell apart during Libya's Arab Spring. The Friendship Treaty became a dead letter after NATO's bombing raids flew out of Italian military airfields. Italy's embassy in Tripoli was burned and trashed by Gaddafi mobs. Now, very slowly and tentatively, relations are being restored. Paternalism isn't the order of the day, a senior Italian diplomat told me. The Monty government has held out a hand of friendship, offering assistance in many fields, including the training of Libya's future security and police forces. 100 Italian military trainers will leave shortly for Tripoli, and in addition, 250 Libyan soldiers will be trained here in Italy in border control duties. During Mr. Monti's recent brief stay in Tripoli, the transitional government made it clear that they have many needs. They lack helicopter pilots, and Italy's Civil aviation department is already training Libyan air traffic controllers. There's no proper firefighting service, and the Coast Guard search and rescue service needs reorganising. The Libyans have also asked the Italians for help in reforming their legal system. Over a thousand war wounded are to be treated in Italian hospitals. Fifteen vehicles have been shipped to Tripoli to patrol the pipelines, bringing Libyan crude from the desert to the coast for shipment. A big Italian trade delegation is to visit Tripoli soon, but the watchword is slowly, slowly. The bombastic public diplomacy led by Silvio Berlusconi and Muammar Gaddafi. When the Libyan leader pitched his tent in a Rome park and Gaddafi brought over some prize Arab steeds for an equestrian display and asked a local escort service to arrange for him to meet groups of young Italian women. That's all over. Italian diplomats realize they have to act tactfully and to avoid pressuring the new leadership in Tripoli. The interesting thing is that they tend to communicate in English, not in Italian. Although many Libyans have a knowledge of the language they picked up from watching Italian TV or listening to Italian radio, English is the foreign language of the future in the new Libya.
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David Willie in Rome. Now. France, like Britain, once had a far flung overseas empire. Its culture was carried to all four corners of the world. But again, like Britain, France lost control of most of its former territories and has found it hard to come to terms with its imperial past. The links between France and Indochina, the region which now consists of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, have proved particularly long lasting. Even after the end of France's empire in Asia, people and ideas continued to travel back and forth across the world. And today there is still a corner of a French field that is forever Indochina. Chris Bockman has been to the small town of Saint Livrade to try to understand why.
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First, a brief history lesson. In the 1950s, like Britain, France saw its overseas colonial empire begin to unravel rapidly. France's Far Eastern colony, Indochina, or Andochene, was no exception. In the mid-1950s, the French packed their bags and left in a hurry. However, thousands of local residents who had worked for the French colonial administration or had married French citizens were considered traitors by much of the local population and their lives were in danger. So Paris allowed some of them to come to France. They were called the French expatriates of Indochina. 1200 of them were brought over by boat and were told they could stay in a run down former army camp near the small town of St. Livrade in southwest France. The living conditions were bad, cramped, sanitation and heating nearly non existent, and the new residents faced severe restrictions on their movements so as not to antagonize the local population. It was all supposed to be temporary, just for a few months, until something better was found. Except nearly 60 years later, they're still there. To be precise, 30 of the original residents are still there. They're now in their late 80s and 90s. The rest have died and the children have moved on and made their own lives. The local French population referred to the camp as Vietnam Sur lt or Vietnam on the River Lot. The camp had its own Asian shops and restaurants on base, and while the children were taught in French, the adult refugees spoke Vietnamese and the remaining survivors still do. But interestingly, whatever language they used all took French names. The hundreds of families lived in rows of long, narrow, grey, low ceilinged concrete buildings that resemble farm outhouses more than homes. Most are now abandoned, except for the last 30 families still there. And when you go inside the homes, you're hit by two Distinct sensations. One, that you're clearly somewhere in Asia, and secondly, that you've been thrown back to another era when France had an empire. There are photos of French soldiers parading proudly in Indochina. Hats on the wall of the kind once worn by French colonial officials. It's the same feeling one gets when visiting, say, a British expatriate club in some parts of east or Southern Africa, with models of Spitfires and big game hunting trophies on the wall. 91 year old Emile Lujan, who spent seven years in jail in Indochina for fighting alongside the French, is still bitter about what happened to him. Surrounded by Buddha statues, he says there was never any effort to integrate the Indochina expatriates into French life. He told me integration was a dirty word back then, and the only solution for them was to adapt to the new situation and not kick up a fuss. The men went to work in local factories and the women in the fields nearby. But contact with the French was kept to a minimum. Another of the original survivors is Pierre Charles Manicon. When I meet him, he's watching Vietnamese TV thanks to a satellite dish. When he arrived, he told me his family of 10 were housed in two rooms and shared outdoor toilets with other families. Contact with the outside world was strictly controlled until the 1970s. He tells me the French people are no better or worse than anyone else. But the French state had let the Indochina expatriates down. Health and safety in the camp had never been a priority until 2004, when one of the elderly residents died in a house fire because of faulty electricity. The French authorities finally decided to it was time to act. Some of the disused barrack homes have been knocked down and small new houses with an Asian look are going up in their place. And the last residents are now being urged to move in. But the irony is that most don't want to. Having lived in their homes for nearly 60 years, they can't face the idea of being uprooted again. As Pierre Charles Manicon told me, we've had to wait more than half a century for proper housing to be built. But all the elderly residents have died. There are just 30 of us left. And he added, all our children have moved on to make their own lives.
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Chris Bachmann in southwest France a few years back, if you fancied an exotic rail trip, you didn't have a lot of choice. It was the Trans Siberian or maybe a tuxedo jaunt down to Venice on the Orient Express. Today, there are endless ways in which you can spend a fortune on a luxury train journey. Rolling stock's been renovated. A pianist plays in the restaurant car. The finest chefs have been brought in. There isn't a curled up sandwich in sight. Hamilton Wenday's just been sampling a railway holiday which took him through six southern African countries. His fellow passengers, he says, soon came to observe that life outside their gilded carriages was a lot less comfortable.
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A loud, drawn out hoot from the locomotive echoed through the African dusk. The train came screeching slowly to a halt. I shoved my head out of the window just in time to see a family of elephants crossing the tracks. There was nothing for it but to wait while the female ushered her babies across the line. That single unexpected moment at sunset on the border of Huanghe national park in Zimbabwe epitomized the allure of our journey through Africa. My fellow passengers were mostly older, retired Europeans and Americans, and our train had air conditioned private cabins and bathrooms, a bar and a dining car. The rolling stock was a trip into nostalgia. It was made up of old refurbished Rhodesian and South African rail cars with the logos RR or a small springbok head embossed on the windows. We began at Victoria Falls, sleeping on the train at night, while there were day trips to Zambia and Botswana. It was on a boat safari in Chobe that I overheard two antipodeans looking through binoculars and discussing the merits of a magnificent kudu bul. Do you think it's as big as a roo? One of them asked the other. Yeah, he replied, about the same. Two nights later we pulled out in the gathering darkness, bound for Huangge and our encounter with the elephants. From there it was a long, slow voyage on steel through Bulawayo, Matobos, then across to Gueru and down to Mashvingo and onto the ruins of the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe. At every stop on our journey, curious and largely poor Africans came to stare at the gleaming magnificence of our train. The irony of this was not lost on our largely rich tourists. They were shocked to see the extremes of wealth and poverty that existed. Zimbabwe is a country known for the intransigence of its aging president, Robert Mugabe. Some in the west even object to travelling there as tantamount to supporting his regime. And yet all the Zimbabweans, black and white I met, disagreed. They welcomed visitors. As a result of a political agreement after the elections in 2008, the ruling party no longer controls the Finance Ministry, the economy is slowly recovering after years of hyperinflation, and tourism is key to creating jobs for people who have no other choice for the moment but to Accept President Mugabe's rule. At three o'clock one morning, we crossed the Limpopo river into South Africa. From there we headed east to the beaches of Mozambique, then on further south to the Ezelwini Valley of Swaziland, and all the way north to Johannesburg. The sheer logistical challenges of a luxury train travelling through altogether nearly 4,000 miles of southern Africa provided continuous surprises and delays. A railway strike in Zimbabwe meant that reaching the remote station at Dete was no guarantee that we would be able to continue on the next section to Bulawayo. A derailment on the line ahead in South Africa meant that we were diverted to run through spectacular scenery along the edge of the famous Kruger Park. Uncertain departures, surprising arrivals and unexpected detours all added to the fascination of the trip. Africa became part of the experience for the passengers. The poverty of local people in all the countries we visited was hard for them to comprehend. At the tiny siding of Sumabula in Zimbabwe, they clubbed together to buy sports equipment for the local primary school. At other stops they gave money or small gifts to the children who crowded around the carriages. As the train rolled on through the vastness of the landscape, they began to understand something of the paradox of both beauty and hardship that defines this continent. This has been a life changing experience, more than one of them said to me along the route. And so it was a voyage of unforgettable impressions. The breathtaking grandeur of the Victoria Falls, the turquoise wideness of the Indian Ocean, the lichen covered boulders surrounding Cecil Rhodes grave in Matobos. Or simply lying in bed as we clickety clacked through the darkness and watching the moon through the train window shimmering over the bush veldt near Johannesburg. On the last day of our trip, we were passing an empty field when I spotted a young boy smiling and waving furiously through the long green grass. There is something about travelling on a slow, clunky train that makes people want to wave at you. And knowing that, I waved back, sorry that our journey had come to an end.
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And that's Hamilton Wenday. Think of Vienna and the mind conjures up the music of Strauss and architecture, appropriately imposing for a city which was once the capital of a powerful empire. You also think about cafes and cakes. UNESCO certainly has those cafes on its mind. It recently added Viennese coffee house culture to its list of intangible items of cultural heritage. It said that the tradition of cafes in the Austrian capital was distinctive, citing their very specific atmosphere. It added that they were places, and I'm quoting here, where Time and space are consumed, but only the coffee is found on the bill. Bethany Bell's been considering what exactly it is which makes a Viennese cafe so special.
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Not long ago, I went to a little cafe close to where I live in Vienna. It's a place I drop into from time to time, but which I hadn't visited for a couple of years. As I walked through the door, the server behind the gleaming glass counter turned to greet me. Pluscotte, I replied, and smiled at her. For a moment she looked at me very sternly, her brow furrowing. I half expected her to tell me off for disturbing her work at the espresso machine. Then she you want a melange with extra hot milk and not too much foam. She had remembered exactly how I take my coffee, melange being a Viennese variation on the cappuccino. I love cafes. Whenever I travel, it's always a pleasure to discover where the locals go to drink coffee or tea and hang out. But it can't be denied that in Vienna, cafe culture has been developed into a high art. It's partly the looks the marble tabletops, the highly polished woodwork, the crystal chandeliers, and the way your coffee cup is brought to you on a little silver tray accompanied by a glass of water. The coffee isn't cheap. A melange or a cappuccino will set you back by more than three or four euros for a small cup. But you can linger on for hours without ordering anything else, and no one will ask you to leave. A friend and I once spent the whole day in Cafe Diglass in central Vienna, working on a translation. Our table was piled high with laptops, dictionaries and papers, and we were too broke to order much. But every hour or so the waiter, unbidden, would bring us two glasses of tap water on a silver tray. They do it to show you're welcome to stay, my friend said. The practice, she told me, dated back to Vienna's housing crisis in the 19th century. If you were cold and had nowhere to go, you could always take refuge in a cafe. The heyday of Vienna's coffee houses arguably came in the late 19th and early 20th century, when they were at the centre of the city's burgeoning intellectual and cultural life. They hosted figures like Freud, Klimt, Herzl and the young Wittgenstein, and were the scene of arguments and intense debate. One story tells of an encounter in a cafe between the composer Johannes Brahms and his arch rival, Anton Bruckner. Bruckner, who was sitting at A separate table ordered a coffee with whipped cream that Brahms called out is the only thing we have in common. Those days may be over now, but the memories remain. And I have to confess that my appreciation of the excellent apple strudel at the Cafe Central is always subtly enhanced by the knowledge that Leon Trotsky used to be a regular there. Do coffee houses still play an important role in Viennese society? I asked a well known Austrian television presenter as we sat together in his favorite neighbourhood cafe. Oh, yes, he replied without hesitation. In the big cafes it's all about being seen. As for places like this, well, this is my second living room. The Viennese pride themselves on the Gimmicklichkeit, an untranslatable word suggesting comfort and cosiness of their coffee houses. But unlike a Starbucks, where you can go and slouch on a sofa, a Vienna cafe demands something more from you. From the moment you place your order, you are aware of a slight pressure to live up to the magnificent surroundings. Traditionally, waiters work in the same cafe for years on end, and they are in command. That can take some getting used to. While some are friendly, others can appear supercilious or even rude. I once dropped into Cafe Lantmann, where some friends were having breakfast and sat down, flinging my coat over the back of a chair. A few minutes later, the coat check lady walked over, picked up my coat and handed me a ticket. Oh, you don't need to take it, I said. I'm only staying for a few minutes. She looked at me reprovingly. Madam, she replied, this is the way we do things here. I took the ticket. But persevere with the waiting staff and you'll be rewarded. As I was told when I first came to live here, the day they remember how you take your coffee is the day you've been accepted.
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It pays to keep in with the waiters. Bethany Bell in Vienna bringing this edition to a close. I'll be here again on Saturday morning with correspondence far and wide. Do join us.