← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
24 September 2011
00:28:20
Kate Adie shares stories behind the headlines with correspondents around the world....
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Transcript14 lines
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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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Good morning. Today we're at the funeral of Bohanuddin Rabbani. Reflecting on the return to prominence of Afghanistan's warlords, we sample the intimate relationship between football and politics in Turkey, why the residents of Tokyo are cancelling the leases on their high rise apartments. And with some trepidation, our correspondent has the opportunity to check out a Libyan hospital as a patient. Afghanistan yesterday buried one of its most prominent leaders of the last 30 years. Burhanuddin Rabbani was an Islamic scholar and one of the most influential figures in the Mujahideen guerrillas who defeated Russian forces in the 1980. But as David Loyne, who's in Kabul, says, not everyone saw him as a hero.
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In a city where the past so often jostles with the present, the hilltop burial site of Burhanuddin Rabani is peopled with ghosts from failed foreign interventions. It was from here that Afghan soldiers began their assault on the British fort below in the winter of 1841, forcing an army out of Kabul, a defeat that cost 16,000 lives. That hill is home as well to the ruins of an open air swimming pool built by the Russians in the 1980s. At the funeral, veteran warlords from the guerrilla war against Russia lined up to salute their founding father close to the incongruous landmark of the war damaged diving board. The man they buried had studied in Egypt in the 1960s, developing a radical form of political Islam inspired by Said Qutb, whose thinking also gave birth to the Muslim Brotherhood across the Arab world and in part informed Osama bin Laden. Robani organized student Islamist groups in Kabul in the early 1970s, recruiting leaders like Ahmed Sharmasoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatiah, Islamic radicals a generation before the Taliban, who opposed rights for women and other moderate reforms before all were forced to flee the country after a crackdown in 1973. They were welcomed enthusiastically by Pakistan, who trained them in guerrilla warfare so that when Russian forces invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Rabbani and his former student followers were ready for combat. But what of the Afghanistan not mourning on the hill, the millions who believe Rabbani should have been indicted as a war criminal for his part in the murderous excesses of the civil war in the early 1990s between the mujahideen he'd created. For many, the continued influence of the old warlords is the biggest obstacle to stability and progress. There are decent middle ranking civil servants and politicians who strive to make this a better country, but they're worn out by corruption. I went to see a long standing contact who's had various senior jobs in security. I won't give his name as he's now wary of speaking out in public amid growing suspicion and fear. He was generous as always and we ate lunch alongside the US Colonel and his team who partner his work. He told me that however well trained his men, their morale is low as they constantly see criminals they've arrested being released on the word of a powerful protector. He was ground down by it. Didn't think he could last much longer. Another source spread out a map in his office pointing to the good governors and police chiefs and then naming the shadow network of warlords who squat alongside them, leeching money out of the system. The warlords were forced out of power during the austere years of the Taliban, but 10 years after America's longest war began, they're back and more powerful than ever, described in a new acronym by the large international presence here, CPN's criminal patronage networks. And in a country where 97% of official GDP comes from foreign aid, the patronage is fuelled by cash from foreign taxpayers, mostly from the usa, where there's growing political pressure for better oversight of the money. Relations are so bad that U.S. treasury officials have been banned from the Afghan Central bank after calling for better accounting practices, including simple things like tracking banknotes by keeping a record of serial numbers. And Britain has suspended aid payments until there are answers as to how nearly all of the money put into a major Afghan investment bank disappeared. History hangs heavily over all this. The route to wealth for Robani and his comrades began in the 1980s when billions of dollars of unaccountable U.S. and other foreign aid sloshed around Pakistan's northwest frontier region during the war against Russia in Afghanistan. Then the US approved and funded Pakistan's support for cross border militancy. Of course it's different now, the three decades later. The same paymaster, the US is more outspoken in condemnation of Pakistani influence and control over the Taliban and other insurgents and daily more concerned about stability in Afghanistan. As work begins on the mausoleum to cover the hilltop tomb next to the ruined diving board, what monument Will the US led intervention of 2001 leave behind as troops begin to draw down in the coming two years. The biggest fear is a repeat of the chaos of those terrible days in the early 1990s when the mujahideen groups, inspired by Robani, fought among themselves. Preventing a repeat of the civil war will involve far closer attention to the rule of law and a far firmer hand against corruption to weaken the warlords than has been shown so far.
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David Loyne in Kabul. Six months on, Japan is still feeling the after effects of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that killed up to 28,000 people. The World bank has estimated that it'll take five years and up to 350 billion pounds to restore the buildings and infrastructure in the northeast coastal district. In Tokyo, there was no substantial physical damage, but people felt strong tremors. And residents of the city with its glossy high tech skyscrapers, are beginning to rethink where they want to live and work, as Roland Burke has been finding out.
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When Emiko Yamamoto opens her curtains in the morning, she's rewarded with a spectacular view right across Tokyo. From the 30th floor, she can see the high rises and elevated expressways, the bullet train, and even on a clear day, the snow capped cone of Mount Fuji far in the distance. It's the kind of outlook Tokyo dreams are made of. But Emiko can't wait to leave. Back in March, she was inside her apartment when the earthquake hit. The building swayed alarmingly, books came off shelves, furniture crashed around her and she thought she would die. Then when she tried to get out, she found the lift wasn't working. It was a long, long walk down the stairs as the aftershocks rumbled through. Now Emiko and her husband are looking for a house. Another flat would do at a push, they say, but nothing higher than the second floor. People in Tokyo have always known their city is built on major fault lines. Throughout history, it has periodically been destroyed by earthquakes, so a big quake with its epicentre under the capital is a possibility at any moment. Seismologists say is not a question of if, but when. The last was in 1923, so the next is in fact already well overdue. Until the big earthquake in March, it was something Tokyo residents seemed able to largely put to the back of their minds while they got on with their lives. That's the only way to deal with an ever present threat about which little can be done. The epicentre of that quake was well to the north off Japan's coast, but it still gave Tokyo the most dramatic shake most people have ever experienced. Scientific opinion Is the shifted strains in the earth's crust make a big one right under the capital more likely now, not less so. It's forced Tokyo residents to confront the uncomfortable reality. These days, a great view is not the selling point it once was. Adverts and brochures for new apartment blocks lay great emphasis on earthquake proofing. The elaborate foundations, the stocks of emergency meals, water and generators in some of the best buildings. The quality of the ground underneath reclaimed land, and there is a lot of it in Tokyo, is judged less safe, vulnerable to liquefaction. Even so, sales of high rise apartments plummeted after the earthquake in March. Some renters who can have moved. It's all got one of Japan's most successful property developers thinking. Akira Mori has become a billionaire, the country's third richest man, by building some of its biggest towers. Now, he says, the era of skyscrapers reaching ever higher is over. He's calling for a new vision of Tokyo. Lower, wider buildings designed to be refuges in times of crisis. They would be equipped to be self sufficient for a week or more, so so their residents could stay put while normality returns outside. Mr. Mori told me he never liked skyscrapers personally. He once tried living on the 20th floor, but found it inconvenient getting down to street level anyway. The sun blazed through the plate glass windows, and now he sees a change in the psychology of the Japanese. For decades, his fellow countrymen have wanted to live and work up high.
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Not anymore.
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The irony is, of course, that during the earthquake back in March, not a single tower fell in Japan, even up in Sendai, the city nearest to the epicentre. Yes, some walls were cracked, pavements were crumpled, but the buildings themselves remained standing throughout. They swayed, though, even long after the tremors had stopped, as the forces of the earth lurching about were distributed through the structure. Being inside made people feel seasick. And then there was the fear, too. The lesson Japanese engineers have taken is that making buildings resilient is not enough. The other day, I went to a development centre run by one of Japan's biggest construction companies. Inside a massive concrete building the size of a large church, a big table was mounted on machinery which could throw it in any direction. For testing structures. They ran it through an exact simulation taken from seismograph readings of the quake back in March. Quite an eye opener. During the real thing, everything around was moving together, of course, so there was nothing standing still to give context. But now I could see just how much the ground had moved. Japanese engineers have already developed foundations mounted on rubber to insulate entire buildings embracing, to reinforce structures. They're designed to sway, bending and flexing rather than snapping. But the challenge now, they say, is to make towers that don't just withstand earthquakes, but that, to the people inside, feel as if they will too.
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Roland Burke in Tokyo, it's sometimes called the beautiful game. But every so often, football matches are sometimes a scene of very unbeautiful behaviour from fans. Take one of Turkey's largest clubs, Fenerbahce. It was already mired in a major match fixing scandal. And then, after crowd trouble in July, it was ordered to play the first two games of the season behind closed doors. This week, the authorities relented for the second match and allowed just women and children to watch. They had realised that playing to an empty stadium was not good for the image of Turkish football. And Tim Mansell, who was at the first match, agrees.
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Watching football in an empty stadium is like watching the dress rehearsal of a play. It's not entertainment, it's merely business. Everyone wants to get their lines right, but there's no one to laugh at the jokes, no one to applaud at the interval. It's a one way conversation. Yet the silence does reveal details that are normally hidden. As I sat in the press box high in the stand on a warm Istanbul evening, watching the Turkish champions Fenerbahce, I could hear not only individual players calling for the ball, but even the smack of hands as one of them commiserated with a teammate after a shot curled narrowly wide of the goal. Fenerbahce's fans had been excluded because they'd misbehaved at a friendly match in July. First they'd hurled abuse and then bottles of water at the assembled representatives of the media. After that, they'd invaded the pitch shouting anti government slogans and the game was abandoned. The cause of their fury was the arrest a couple of weeks previously of several club officials, most significantly the president Aziz Yildirim. And the way the press had reported it, Fenerbahce is arguably the biggest club in Turkey, although its Istanbul rivals, Galatasaray and Beikta, would probably disagree. They have literally millions of supporters, some of them well known. The writer Orhan Pamuk has spoken about his childhood as a Fenerbahce fan. The Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, supports them, and the very founder of the modern Turkish Republic, Kemal Ataturk himself, was a Fenerbahce man. You meet Ataturk as you step into the rather gloomy club museum in the bowels of the stadium. He stands in a glass case, resplendent in white tie and holding a hat. I was given a guided tour by the museum's director, who told me how Ataturk's undying affection for the club was cemented during the War of independence in the 1920s, when Fenerbahce members smuggled arms from Istanbul to Anatolia to support the fight for freedom. The ultimate symbol of Fenerbahce as a bastion of Republican Turkey is the enormous Harrington cup, also in a glass case just inside the door, presented by General Charles Harrington, the commander of the Allied forces then occupying Istanbul. Fenerbahci won the large silver trophy in a match against a team of British soldiers. It wasn't long afterwards that the occupying force left and the Turkish Republic was proclaimed. So football and politics have been intimately entwined in Turkey from the very beginning. And when Aziz Yildirim was arrested, Fenerbahce supporters began to look for political explanations. Some wondered whether he'd fallen out with the prime minister over a proposed business deal. Others whether he was being punished for his close relationship with the Turkish military at a time when the army's influence on politics is diminishing. Aziz Yldrm is a wealthy industrialist and defence contractor. What they didn't seem to be asking was whether he could actually be guilty. Rumours of bribes and gifts, of mafia connections, of punishment beatings, have long swirled around Turkish football. The word untouchable comes up a lot when you talk about men like Aziz Yldrm, men with vast wealth and serious political connections. But in a Turkey where scores of senior military officers also find themselves behind bars, suspected of plotting a military coup, no one, it seems, is untouchable any longer. Which is not to say that Mr. Yildirim is guilty of anything. He's not even been charged yet, and that's likely to take several more weeks. Fenerbahce remains firmly behind him. When the players ran on at the beginning of the game, each of them wore a T shirt with his portrait on the front. There may have been no fans, but the TV cameras were still there. So was the stadium announcer. And he performed at deafening volume despite the absence of an audience, his voice reverberating through the empty stadium. When he introduced the teams and when he announced the name of the Fenerbahce form forward, who scored the only goal of the game and celebrated by rushing to the touchline, grabbing one of those Yildirim T shirts and waving it in the air, it could be that he was addressing the fans outside. Hundreds of them had gathered before the game and they stood in the street for the full 90 minutes, singing, chanting and blowing their horns. They were still there when I left at the end and we had a chance to chat. Wasn't it possible that Mr. Yildrim was guilty? I asked one, a young woman doing a PhD in neuroscience for me. He is innocent, she said. 100% innocent. But then I'm not an objective person. I don't have to be objective about this. The words of a true fan, Tim
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Mansell the disputed territory of Abkhazia, which broke away from Georgia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, voted in a new de facto government in August. The only major country which recognizes Abkhazia as a nation state is Russia, and the elections were condemned by Western governments which see the territory as part of Georgia. But this policy of non recognition is not having the desired effect. It's actually helping Russia increase its influence in the region, as Damian McGuinness found out when he went to Abkhazia for the elections.
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It's the first time I've crossed a border pulled by a horse. But then, the frontier between Georgia and Abkhazia is not any ordinary crossing. For a start. As far as Georgia is concerned, this isn't actually a border at all, but rather Georgian territory now occupied by Russia because of a bloody war of secession in the 1990s between Georgia and Abkhazia. Georgian cars aren't exactly welcome here today, so we leave ours on the Georgian side and pile our high tech TV and radio equipment onto a rather low tech wooden horse drawn cart and scramble on next to some elderly ladies in headscarves and a young woman with a baby. One old lady strokes the baby's cheek fondly and then with a toothless smile strokes mine. The road doesn't seem to have been repaired since the war, so it's not exactly a comfortable ride, but there's plenty of laughing and joking the as we bounce along a potholed road towards the Abkar's border. Is the transport like this in London? One old woman asks with a giggle as I almost lose the tripod off the back of the cart. The Abkhar's checkpoint itself appears to be an abandoned railway carriage. In one corner a uniformed official is glued to a screen shooting enemy soldiers in a rather violent looking computer game. Another, with an impressive looking knife on his desk, slowly writes down our details in a large tattered looking notebook. To Western eyes, Georgia can sometimes seem a bit ramshackle, but it's positively posh compared to Abkhazia. That's because the region is in a sort of economic limbo. There's a trade embargo between Abkhazia and Georgia, and Western governments are wary of helping economically. Any financial support of Abkhazia would upset Georgian allies by seeming to shore up Abkhaz independence. Instead, the west is simply ignoring Abkhazia, an approach which appears to be backfiring as it is pushing the territory even more into Russia's eager embrace. As the region's new de facto president, Alexandra Ankwab, told me, Europe knows how to talk but doesn't actually do much. Russia, on the other hand, backs up its words with actions, and there's certainly plenty of evidence of that. 70% of Abkhazia's budget is paid for by Russian money. Thousands of Russian soldiers are based here, and the only real economic growth comes from increasing numbers of Russian tourists, many of whom remember Abkhazia as an exotic playground for the Soviet elite. Georgians say this support from Moscow is evidence that Abkhazia is nothing more than a Russian backed puppet state designed to undermine their sovereignty. And for the tens of thousands of Georgians who fled during the war in the 1990s, it's not just fields and property they lost, but also their homeland. But for the Abkars themselves, dealing with Russia is a delicate balancing act. Traditionally, they've been fiercely independent of Moscow, ferociously fighting the tsarist authorities in the 19th century and later Stalin in the 20th. But today they know they need Russia to maintain independence from Georgia. Russia provides money, military support and recognition as an independent state. Europe and the U.S. meanwhile, seem reluctant to even get involved, let alone help. And the need for help is clear when you're in the capital, Sohumi. Many of the art deco mansions are slowly sinking into the lush vegetation while the piers are crumbling into the sea. You can see the bomb craters and shrapnel scars from the war 20 years ago. And the main government building is still a scorched, bombed out shell looming over the city like a rotten tooth. As we leave Abkhazia to go back into Georgia a few days later, the same tired looking horse is waiting patiently as more elderly women unsteadily clamber onto the cart. These women, who cross regularly to trade in the local markets on either side of the border and are about the only contact that now exists between Georgia and Abkhazia. Their governments may not be talking to each other, but as the old ladies gossip and giggle in a mixture of languages, it's clear that given the chance,
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ordinary people will Damian McGuinness it's bad enough. Falling ill on holiday, trying to find a doctor, trying to understand the different and sometimes strange forms of treatment on offer. But what if you start feeling unwell in a war zone? Andrew Harding had that experience just recently.
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It was a strange night. I was woken by two Filipino women in starched nurses uniforms at the foot of my bed. One was holding a razor. A little later, the lights blinked on again. A Ukrainian nurse was now gripping a large syringe. What are you doing? I asked. She shrugged. This is not your concern. Let me rewind a little. A day earlier, I was on the edge of the Libyan desert outside a town called Bani Walid. Rebel fighters were racing past in their usual chaotic manner. They'd been trying to storm the town for days, but Colonel Gaddafi's forces have bigger guns and better discipline. Journalists kept edging forwards a kilometer or two, then tearing back after coming under mortar, rocket or sniper fire. It had been the same pattern for a week. Abruptly, we heard news that a BBC colleague, the brave Lebanese journalist Mohammed Ballou, had just been shot. Ahead of us, a single sniper's bullet had killed one man, injured another, and finally come to a stop in Mohammed's chest. It was serious but not life threatening. He's had surgery now and is doing well. At the time, as dusk fell and we pulled back towards Tripoli, it seemed that at best inappropriate to make too much of the stomach pains that had been bothering me for a couple of days and preventing me from eating. Still, the next morning I was feeling worse, and with the looming prospect of a few nights camped in the desert, I decided to find some antibiotics at a local clinic to sort me out. We were recommended a hospital linked to the National Oil Corporation in a suburb of the capital. There were armed guards outside, a noisy crowd in reception, but down the corridors beyond, my first glimpse into a different Libya. It was a place of wealth and order and lots of foreigners. There were Russian surgeons, a chatty Macedonian nurse, dozens of Filipinos, and a formidable Scottish matron in English. Even the Libyans had a broad range of accents. I studied in Cardiff, explained the first doctor to have a look at me, as he gently suggested that my guts weren't the problem. All the foreigners seem to have been in Libya for years. Sixteen now, said Maria, the Macedonian. The pay was good. The well funded hospital served oil workers rich and poor, expat. Life was cloistered but enjoyable. Of course, all that changed when the fighting began. During the battle for Tripoli last month, the casualties were crowded onto every inch of floor. The neighbourhood itself came under heavy fire as Colonel Gaddafi's loyalists withdrew from the city. It was terrible, said Maria. I can show you the bullet holes upstairs. But all the staff stayed on, and by the time I arrived a month later, a wartime spirit of camaraderie, generosity and optimism still filled the hospital. I, on the other hand, was feeling trapped and defensive. The doctors, absurdly, I thought, seemed to think it was my appendix. They wanted to operate fast. I clung to the belief that I must have eaten some dodgy seafood and just needed a few pills. But the evidence was building solidly against me, and by the next morning, I could see that my obstinacy was being interpreted as a lack of faith in their hospital and judgment. And so I surrendered and stared at the ceiling as the surgical masks loomed over me. I think I remember a Russian anaesthetist trying to get me to sing along with him. Then the words and the room turned to glue and vanished. A man called Salahuddin woke me late that evening. He was on crutches and had limped in from the next room along for a chat. Salahuddin was 28, a doctor and a patient. He'd been in the desert outside Baniwalee, too, in charge of an ambulance crew bringing out the wounded. A week earlier, he said, his vehicle had been hit by gunfire. A bullet went through his back and out of his leg, shattering his pelvis on the way. Saladin kept smiling, and my grogginess started to feel like bad manners. During the rebellion, he said, he treated Colonel Gaddafi's soldiers during the day at a clinic in central Tripoli and then slipped out at night to help rebel casualties in the city. Now it's all changed, he grinned. It's nearly over. He turned and inched slowly back to his room. The next morning, the Libyan surgeon walked in with a told you so smile. He was brandishing my badly swollen appendix in a plastic jar. Nurse Maria explained that Libyans liked to take home any missing bits to show their relatives and to prove they hadn't been malingering, I left mine behind.
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And with Andrew Harding donating his appendix to the Libyans, we've reached the end of this edition. Back again next week with two programmes on Thursday and Saturday. Do join us. Goodbye.