← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
22 Oct 2011
00:28:01
Gabriel Gatehouse describes the scenes at that infamous sewer pipe, where Colonel was...
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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. To keep up with our latest reports and get a sneak preview of the stories, you can sign up to our Twitter feed as well. But now, with the addition Broadcast on Radio 4, here's Kate Ady.
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Today, an aging bewildered man asks, what have I ever done to you? And we hear about Colonel Gaddafi's many public faces. From Motown backing vocalist to desert mystic away from Libya. Can Argentina, which defaulted on its own huge debts, serve as an example to the likes of Greece? There's much black and white on display around Marine Le Pen of France's Front National. And we're with Africa's real number one detectives. Another week, another dictator gone. Colonel Gaddafi's end was messy, confusing and grisly. Much in common with his rule, perhaps the setting, the garrison town of Cirte was full of plush villas and well equipped military bunkers. For a dictator needs a loyal army living in comfort to discourage it from plotting a coup the way he'd seized power 42 years ago. I once met one of his cousins, a General, in a mansion there full of overstuffed Italianate furniture and bottles of Scotch. The General lived in the lap of luxury and was quite terrified of his cousin. No one was safe in Libya, including eventually the Colonel, whose final moments were tracked by Gabriel Gatehouse.
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The first we heard of Colonel Gaddafi's capture was over a crackly radio, a walkie talkie set in a truck full of fighters. These men used to be called rebels. Now they're the victors of this eight month civil war. It was around midday, we were being escorted into the centre of Sirte, where the fighting had for weeks been concentrated on a small area of the city known as Sector 2. But today things didn't feel quite right. There were roadblocks in places where there hadn't been before and they were unmanned. Sirte felt more deserted than usual. We'd been told of a mass breakout by Gaddafi loyalists. Snipers were said to be roaming around the city. I had the feeling of being watched. The fighters first response to the news was one of disbelief. More than anything, a day earlier, the final capture of Sute had seemed a long and arduous way off. Plus few people seriously believed that Colonel Gaddafi himself was still hiding in that ever shrinking corner of his hometown. And yet, as we drove on, it became clear that the news was spread, spreading a small group of fighters stopped us further down the road with an impromptu celebration, jumping up and down, firing their guns in the air and chanting. We got the curly haired one. A young man grinned. But even they seemed only to half believe it. So often in the past, anti Gaddafi forces had announced the capture of this member of the Gaddafi family or the imminent fall of that city, only to have to backtrack still, while we figured that if Colonel Gaddafi had indeed been caught by a brigade of fighters from Misrata, then Misrata would be where they were headed. So we drove back up the road and positioned ourselves on the outskirts of the city, along the highway to the west. If anything important was afoot, we couldn't miss it. Soon enough, the road was filling up with cars and pick up trucks. The Colonel had apparently been taken to a hospital five minutes away. By the time we got there, he'd gone. Driven on, we were told, to Misrata in an ambulance. By now, few seemed to be in any doubt Gaddafi had been caught. A man appeared wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap, claiming to have been the one who'd captured the Colonel. He was brandishing a golden revolver, Gaddafi's own personal handgun, he said. Later that same day, I saw the exact same gun, or a precise replica, in the hands of another fighter. This one was wearing a traditional long shirt. The front was stained with blood. Blood, he said of the dictator. Arguments flared over who was the real hero of the hour. There was a sense of history in the making and people were keen to claim their place. We were now standing on the spot where Colonel Gaddafi had spent his last minutes as a free man in that infamous drainage pipe. A young fighter, nicknamed Shrapnel because of his many battle scars, showed us some gruesome footage that he'd shot on his mobile phone. A frenzied mob was stamping on the cowering figure of Gaddafi, clearly still alive, trying desperately to shield his head from the blows. Just across the road from the jubilant fighters who were now posing to take pictures at the drain, there were more chilling reminders that here, as in any war, one man's victory is another's defeat. The charred remains of more than a dozen cars lay scattered in the dust. These had been part of Colonel Gaddafi's convoy as he tried to escape the city. A NATO airstrike had taken them out with cold precision in what may turn out to have been the alliance's last significant act. In the skies over Libya, French missiles had incinerated most of the occupants. One or two of the blackened bodies were still smoking none of that could dampen the spirits of the fighters, whose sense of jubilation after so many months of war seemed, if anything, to increase on hearing the news that Colonel Gaddafi had not only been captured, but had subsequently been killed, apparently shot in the head. But by whom and when? He was certainly still alive when he was taken in Surte, but by the time he got to Misrata, he was dead. The previous day, I'd spoken to a fighter standing guard in Surt's main hospital. He told me he hoped Gaddafi would be killed rather than captured. One bullet, he'd said ominously, could solve many problems. But those images of an aging man lying bewildered on the ground, trying desperately to avoid the blows of a raging mob, are disturbing. Perhaps the Colonel deserved his fate. He certainly seemed to have little awareness of just how much he was loathed. One fighter told me that in those final moments, as he was dragged from his hole, Muammar Gaddafi had asked, what
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have I ever done to you, Gabriel Gatehouse. On those last moments, Gaddafi was both vain and vicious, cunning and capricious. He once attempted, inscrutable as ever, to joke with me about hostage taking. I didn't know whether to yelp with fake laughter or fall over with fright. Here's Kevin Connolly with his view of the man.
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I can't honestly claim to be among the hundreds of writers in a position to talk about the Colonel Gaddafi I once knew. Although the truth is, if he'd been going round claiming to have met me, I couldn't entirely deny it. We sort of brushed into each other in the lobby of an expensive hotel in Tripoli back in the 1980s, as Libya waited angrily and apprehensively for American air strikes. I was among hundreds of Western journalists invited to witness the devastation Gaddafi assumed was about to rain down on his capital. I don't think the phrase human shield had been coined at the time, but if it had been, it would have described our position nicely. We were kept in gilded confinement, unable to so much as open the heavy glass front doors of the hotel without permission. Enormous buffet meals were served every few hours. Trousers began to tighten, tempers to shorten. News that the Colonel was to pay a visit was lightened the mood considerably. Even then, he changed Personas as other men changed their socks. One day he was a Motown backing vocalist with wet look, permed hair and tight pants, the next, a white suited comic operetta, Latin American admiral dripping with braid. When I saw him, he had chosen the robes of a Berber tribesman and what he presumably imagined to be the inscrutable gaze of the desert mystic. He affected not to notice the crowd of journalists and strode about the lobby, pausing occasionally to gaze into the middle of whatever distance he happened to be facing. It was utterly ludicrous, of course, but somehow we didn't say so. Journalism was a more formal business then than it is now, and we were much given to discussions of where the initiative lay between the Colonel on the one hand and the United States on the other hand. The fact that he was a howling buffoon didn't form part of the reporting of foreign news in those days, but of course it turned out to be the most important thing of all. Gaddafi made you wonder if dictatorship attracts the mad or maddens those attracted to it. He was an old fashioned, theatrical sort of tyrant whose lineage you can trace from the bombastic ravings of Mussolini through the kilted debauchery of IDI Amin to the platform healed kleptocracy of Omar Bongo of Gabon. He recruited a corps of Amazonian female bodyguards, drove a golf buggy and permanently closed every cinema in the country, apparently, in case moviegoers plotted against him. With Gaddafi, though, with all of them, the darkness was always there. Of course, he sponsored terrorism overseas and in Libya at his behest. Fingernails were ripped out and eyes were gouged. Homes and hearts were broken. He corrupted the soul of the nation. Everyone wondered if everyone else was an informer. One middle aged woman told me at the beginning of this last revolution in the battered centre of the city of Benghazi, that she thought the worst thing about living under a dictatorship was that it made you ashamed, that you didn't resist, that you weren't a hero. You pass the habit of fear on to your children. She said she could remember the leaders of a previous student rising in Benghazi being hanged from lamp posts in the city centre. Hands behind their backs, their bodies dangled on long stretches of electrical cable with their feet just a meter or so off the ground. Life choked out of them slowly and agonizingly. And when they were close to death, a well known sidekick of Gaddafi's finished them off by hugging them around the knees and tugging down on their helpless bodies. This had all happened a few years before. I saw Gaddafi posturing and posing in the lobby of that luxury hotel. He was already affecting a look of inscrutability way back then, before years of ham fisted plastic surgery deepened it into an expressionless detachment. And there was nothing to be read in his face about all that killing, all that destruction. Now, of course, There will be no reckoning for Maammar Gaddafi beyond the last great reckoning that faces us all. There will be no questions from the bereaved to help us understand why he did it, and no confessions from his henchmen to tell us how. Perhaps, after all, he will be the last of the grotesque, theatrical, blood stained buffoon dictators. It would be nice to think that a certain type of tyranny died alongside the man who spent his life in a palace and his last moments in
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a sewer pipe, Kevin Connolly, with his goodbye to Gaddafi. It's presidential election time in Argentina tomorrow and the current incumbent, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, is expected to win a large majority. She's the widow of the previous president, Nesta Kirchner. Argentina is renowned for its financial ups and downs. On a return visit there, Peter Day finds that this vast country is doing surprisingly well and wonders if it has lessons for Europe.
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Now, the last time I was here, nine years ago, Argentina was in the middle of one of its periodic crises. And the mood in Buenos Aires was very different from the current wary confidence. The crisis went back a long way. Argentina had tackled its hyper inflation of the late 1980s with shock treatment tying the peso to the US$1. This certainly cut inflation fast, but by the end of the 1990s it had hit the economy hard. Unemployment began to soar. There was a run on the banks as depositors tried to send their money abroad. The government acted to limit cash withdrawals, leading to political chaos, protests on the streets, and four presidents pitched in and out of office in a single week. In the middle of chaos at home, I Argentina defaulted on almost $100 billion of overseas debt, the biggest sovereign debt default in history. And that's why I'm here, of course. Some people are saying that Argentina has lessons to teach other countries with great big debt. Argentine economists have been in demand, I'm told, in Greece, to answer the basic question, is their life after debt default? Well, the answer is, of course there is. On the face of it, Argentina has been flourishing ever since it stepped away from reproduction its overseas debts and allowed the peso to fall more than fourfold against the US dollar. This is in spite of its pariah status among international banks who are still waiting for their money. For several years, the country grew at a positively Asian pace, 9% a year. The number of people living in poverty reduced quite dramatically. Inflation on the official measurement stayed under control. But look more closely and you'll see there are still big difficulties in Argentina. That official inflation figure of 9% a year is challenged by the daily experience of supermarket shoppers. Private economists who set up their own price indices tell you that inflation, properly measured, is more like 25%. But the government has been threatening private economic advisers who say so with big fines for selling for false information. Many workers wages are still increasing by more than 25%, so they're not really feeling the pinch of rising prices yet. So not really much of a lesson there for Greece or other European countries who may be faced with having to default on their debt. Argentina has also had a particular stroke of luck. Over the past few years, there's been an extravagant boom in global food prices. Influenced by the growing appetites of China and India, Argentina has kept its exchange rate low and farmers have earned big money exporting soya beans and wheat to the world market. 100 years ago, Argentina was the 8th largest economy in the whole world, thanks to huge exports of meat from the pampas that fed Europe's hungry cities. And though it's diminished in international importance, the whole country still flourishes when global food prices rise. Meanwhile, I've noticed that one or two little things have changed in Argentina over the past 10 years. The country's wines, grown in some of the highest vineyards in the world in the Andes, have hugely increased in international reputation and the prices overseas drinkers will pay for them. They've always been drinkable, now they are famous. At the other end of the spectrum, there's been an interesting change in status from for Argentina's very poorest people, forced by poverty to sort among the rubbish for stuff they can sell to recycling firms. They're called cateneros, after the cardboard. That's one of the things they collect in Buenos Aires. Pushing their little handcarts across the city from being smelly scavengers, a social nuisance, they've now official status as green pioneers. Christine, the woman running one of the big sorting plants at the Alcebo Cooperative employing 160 people, looked back on her earlier life and she told me, there I was, rummaging around in garbage bags to feed my children. Now look what we've created. And she marveled for a moment at the fully fledged cooperative with its own facilities and official recognition as pioneers of a local green economy. But of course, these cartoneros, recyclers depend for their income on continued decent prices for the paper, plastic and aluminium they sort by hand and send off to the waste processing companies. As Argentina's farmers and politicians will probably discover sooner or later, basic raw material earnings are cyclical. If they go up. They are bound to go down eventually. An elementary lesson, perhaps, for Greece and certainly for the rest of us.
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Peter Day France, too, is gearing up for presidential elections next year. The opposition Socialist Party has confirmed its candidate. He's Francois Hollande. Mr. Hollande is currently ahead of President Sarkozy in the opinion polls. But could France's far right party, the Fronte national, this time in the form of Marine Le Pen, stage another upset, as it did a decade ago? Jamie Kumarasami has just been to meet the daughter of Jean Marie Le Pen, the former paratrooper who founded the Fronte National.
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As I pushed open the heavy wooden door at the entrance of Marine Le Pen's campaign headquarters, my eyes focused on a bright green tree in a field stretching into the distance. It didn't take long to realize it was one of those temps l' oeil fixings that you find in Parisian courtyards, painted wooden structures designed to deceive the eye. But would that deceptive surface be a metaphor for the woman I'd come to see in her presidential campaign base in Paris? Chic 8th arrondissement, a leader who'd spent the last 10 months trying to detoxify or as she would say, de demonize, a political brand known for its anti immigrant platform. The name Le Pen has been a divisive fixture of French politics for as long as I can remember. Teaching English near Bordeaux in the 1980s, I used to pass it every day. Five huge letters painted on a bridge. L, E, P E N. Before long, someone had added an I and AN S. In 2002, I was a BBC's man in Paris as Jean Marie Le Pen shocked the French establishment by entering a presidential run off. At the end of two frenzied weeks, I watched people vote for Jacques Chirac with clothes pegs on their noses. This wasn't love for the pungent president, but loathing for his opponent, a man who had once dismissed the Nazi gas chambers as a detail of history. So the main question facing Jean Marie Le Pen's daughter is can she escape from the party's history, especially one so closely associated with her family name? There's no name of any kind on the door when we arrive. No Le Pen, no Front national, just four cryptic initials, CMLP Standing, we concluded, for Marine Le Pen's committee. A cheerful receptionist ushers into a meeting room where a huge black and white picture of a zebra stares from the wall. On a shelf by the window, there is more ebony and ivory, four giant chess pieces, two black and two white. On the other side of the room, campaign posters scream a less harmonious vision of France, one of rising crime and insecurity and of 203,000 immigrants arriving every year. This, they conclude as a result of President Sarkozy's failed policies. A group of pale, dark haired young men mill around, some offering us greetings, others not all the women there seem young as well. There's no evidence of the older, more traditional Frontes national generation. And as we watch another camera crew leave, it's clear we're part of a conveyor belt media offensive designed to show that Marine Le Pen is a serious presidential contender, that the springtime opinion polls placing her in the number one position were not mistaken. Eventually we're shown into her room and told, politely but forcefully, that Madame Le Pen will do the interview at her desk. This is not what space loving cameramen like to hear, so as we rearrange the furniture, I take in some of the room's contents. A diagonally hung blue flag with the single word liberte, unaccompanied by egalite or fraternite, a hard back book about the navy with the word Marine in the title and a guide to the gold standard, an economic idea from the past which she believes can shape a post Euro future. She exudes calm and charm, asking us to check her make up and joking about a howling cat outside. Her handshake isn't as firm, her voice isn't as deep as I'd expected. It's only when she laughs that she really resembles her father. Is this him, perhaps, having the last laugh? There's no press officer in the room and no notes, just a chord striking. Populist message, anti globalization, anti Brussels, anti creeping Islamification. Her broad remedy? More national sovereignty. She says she's kicked the racists out of her party, but is vague about her father's responsibility for their presence in it in the first place. Her folded arms are a sign that this isn't comfortable territory. She says she'll slash immigration by 95%, but it's not entirely clear how. France, as she puts it, mustn't be a suction pump for the world's misery. The Front national has always opposed the euro, which she now dismisses as an idea whose time has come and gone. When I ask whether she would unilaterally withdraw from the single currency, she when I am president, in a few months time the eurozone probably won't exist. Her main opponents are dismissed as two sides of the same establishment coin. There is a bit less hostility towards the newly elected Socialist candidate, Francois Hollande, she says, so he'll probably be my second round challenger when the interview's over. I can't help noticing that she's been Googling her own name. It's a name that shows no sign of disappearing from France's political landscape.
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Jamie Kumarasami the southern African country of Botswana has never experienced a coup. Since it became independent From Britain in 1966, it's been one of the continent's most stable nations. The country is famous for its diamonds, the wildlife of the Okavango Delta, and rather more fictionally, it's the home of the Number one Ladies Detective Agency. And yet, as John Silverman's discovered, detective work and forensic science is an area of real expertise in Botswana.
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The first surprise was the capital, Gaboroni. More America than Africa. Miles of pothole free tarmac roads, a constellation of well stocked shopping malls, a university campus with a gleaming futuristic library. A city whose physical past reaches back not much further than the 1960s. True, in one small corner, if you look hard enough, there's a crumbling remnant of the old British era prison and a small overgrown cemetery where fallen heroes from the Boer War are buried. A reminder that for many years this former protectorate was governed from Mafeking, just across the border with South Africa. But for all its modernity, Gaboroni can't shrug off the weight of its mythical inheritance. Look no further than a large hill, too puny to be called a mountain, which dominates the skyline. It's the hill of two lovers. I learned the story behind the name from Pauline Habositwe, who heads the police training college. Two young people, much in love were denied permission to marry by their parents, so they eloped and took refuge on the eponymous hill. They never came back, and to this day, their spirits and ghostly voices are said to haunt the landscape. Have you been up the hill? I asked Pauline. No, it's a sacred spot, she said. Africa is not known for the opportunities for advancement offered to women. But in Botswana, the ravages of HIV have removed so many men from the career ladder that it's not surprising to find that the assistant commissioner of police is a woman. And so is the deputy head of cid. At the busiest police station in Gaboroni, a police service once feared for extracting confessions by torture now basks in a gentler image. Pauline's training college is an illustration of how far it's come. A set of outstanding buildings with up to date crime scene labs, multimedia classrooms, even an Olympic sized swimming pool. It's all the more striking when you consider that Botswana is hardly a high crime country, at least not by the standards of South Africa. Though the murder rate is increasing, much of it arising from domestic tensions, so called passion killings and deaths from poisoning are worryingly common, often resulting from a visit to a traditional healer who misjudges the toxicity of a potion. So as you begin to peel back the layers here, you realize that this is a country facing two ways. Pauline is more commonly referred to as Meloti, and that's because in the year she was born, 1963, Botswana suffered a famine. And to keep people alive, the government distributed bags of maize meal with the name Melotti stamped on them. Pauline has a son who's getting married and she's worrying about what to do for his bride price. It's the tradition to give at least eight cattle. She only has one. Her police colleague, Nunu Lesser Tedi, who deserves credit for much of Botswana's remarkable progress in crime scene investigation, has no such concerns. At his cattle post at Mahalope, he has a herd of 130 and sees himself as farmer as well as assistant commissioner of police. That's how it is in this country, he says. You might live in the city, but you return to your village at every opportunity. For an outsider's view, I sought out a burly American cop called James O Smith Jr who's the program director for the International Law Enforcement Academy, the only such establishment in Africa. When he's on leave at his home base, Glencoe, Georgia, Jo, as he's known, has trouble explaining where Botswana is now. A few people might say, isn't that where the elephants are? Or isn't that where the number one ladies stories are set? But on the whole, they don't know too much. They don't know this place is a jewel in the continent of Africa. Not everyone in this region sees it that way. Over the border in South Africa, the firebrand leader of the Youth League of the African National Congress, Julius Malema, has called for the overthrow of Botswana's government. No one here is quite sure why, but at Nunu Lesser Teddy's cattle post, you can't imagine anything more turbulent than the summer rainstorms disturbing the rhythm of life. And whoever is in power, people will still regard the hill of Two Lovers as sacred territory.
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John Silverman, and you can hear his programme about policing in Botswana, the number one forensic detective agency, on Wednesday morning on rad. And we've reached the end of this edition. I'll be back with more from our own correspondence next Thursday at 11 o'. Clock. Goodbye.