← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
A New Egypt
00:28:05
Global despatches: some are pleased at what President al-Sisi's achieved in his first...
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You're about to hear from our own correspondent. We do two versions of the programme, one for the BBC World Service and this one's a download of the latest edition from BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Hello. Today, a new Egypt. That's what President Sisi says he's creating. But his critics maintain he's outdoing even his hardline predecessor when it comes to repression and clamping down on protests. In the far north of Sweden, the Sami people say they're in a fight for survival and all because of riches buried beneath their traditional land. There's a sad story of a lonely baboon marooned on an African island. And a question Does President Putin of Russia have anything in common with Frank Sinatra? Our man in Moscow reckons so. A court in Egypt this week sent a further 68 people to jail for their part in street violence in the capital. Cairo Last year received 15 year sentences and are said to be supporters of the deposed Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. The man who ousted him, Abdel Fattah Al Sisi says he's building a new and democratic Egypt. But since his election in May, many fear the old Egypt is making a comeback with widespread human rights abuse and the jailing of political opponents. Olagarin in Cairo's been taking a look at how President Sisi is reshaping the country.
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On a recent Sunday morning, I was sitting in my flat on the banks of the Nile with a full pot of coffee and an empty computer screen in front of me. My plan was to spend a few hours writing about life in Egypt under President Abdel Fattah El Sisi. Before I could type a word, the story began to write itself. When I heard a sickening thud from my window. I could see smoke rising across the river near the high rise headquarters of the Egyptian Foreign Ministry. Staff were running across the lawn. Soon afterwards, at the scene, I found out that a bomb had killed two policemen at a checkpoint. It was the latest in a series of sporadic militant attacks which have spiraled since July 2013. That was when the Sisi era really began. It was then, as army chief, that he ousted the elected President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood in a popularly backed coup. A year later, he was elected to replace him. Now President Sisi is trying to stamp out a stubborn Islamist insurgency. This is just one battle the retired general has to fight. It's impossible to escape some of the others. On a sweltering summer evening, a Western diplomat friend invited a few journalists around for dinner and a chat. On the menu tender lamb and golden roast potatoes. On the agenda, the future of the Arab world's most populous nation. Do you think there's hope for Egypt? Our hostess asked as we lifted our forks. With her question hanging in the air, we were plunged into darkness by a power cut. Well, that's one answer, she said as groans and sighs erupted around the table. Life in Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt is punctuated by blackouts, sometimes as many as three a day. Egypt has long been called the sleeping giant of the Arab world. Now there's often no choice but to slumber. The power crisis predated President Sisi, but it's his job to keep the lights on. Egyptians are still largely in the dark about how he plans to do that. The pious, softly spoken former intelligence chief is given to pep talks rather than promises. Before you put a piece of bread in your mouth, he said in one speech, think what have you done for Egypt today? He regularly warns that he has no instant cures for the broken economy. He's Mr. Mafiche, said a colleague wearily. Mafish money. Mafiche petrol. Mafish is Egyptian slang, meaning there's none. Sisi has made some bold moves, increasing fuel prices by up to 80% to try to reduce a crippling subsidies bill. Not surprisingly, that's been painful for Egyptians, a quarter of whom live below the poverty line. At petrol stations these days, you can find long queues and short tempers. Sisi has betrayed us, said Awadh, a man in his 40s waiting to fill the tank of a battered taxi van. The price of everything is soaring except the price of human life. The people are worth nothing. A well dressed woman in an air conditioned Toyota sedan had a different view. The price hike is tough, she said, but we have to swallow it for the sake of our children. For now, Egypt's new pharaoh still enjoys considerable support. Some, including the International Monetary Fund, are giving him points for trying to tackle problems ignored for decades. And his strict work ethic is going down well. Ministers have to come to the office at seven in the morning, an elderly Egyptian lady told me over tea and dates. I saw it on state television. They're supposed to eat lunch and dinner in the office. There was nothing like that under Hosni Mubarak. It's unclear how many ministers are actually dining at their desks. But there is another area where many believe Sisi has outdone Mubarak. Egypt's long term repression. Human rights organizations say at least 1400 people have been killed in protests and political violence. Sexual since the coup. Before Sisi's election, one democracy campaigner gave me his prediction. We'll need a lot more jails, he said, because Sisi will keep filling them. These days it's hard to count how many people have been arrested, but one campaign group puts the figure at around 36,000. Just attending a peaceful protest can result in being sentenced to years in jail. It's clear that Mr. Mafish would like
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Mafish dissent Olagarin in Cairo. The so called truce, which was supposed to stop the fighting on the border between Russia and Ukraine, is in tatters this week amid continuing violence. At least nine people were killed yesterday when artillery shells hit the eastern city of Donetsk. One shell exploded near a school on what was the first day of the new academic year. The five month long conflict between Kiev and the separatists of Lugansk and Donetsk led to Western states imposing a series of sanctions on Russia. Steve Rosenberg says it's hard to predict what will happen next.
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These are difficult times in Russia. The ruble is falling, inflation rising and capital fleeing. There are fears of recession, but not everyone here is required to tighten their belt. For example, Russia's new state news agency has just received a huge injection of cash. Russia Sivodnya, which means Russia Today, was created by Vladimir Putin less than a year ago to promote Russia around the world. Its budget for next year is reportedly two and a half times bigger than this year's, a sign of how important information is to the Kremlin. I telephoned Raciya Sivodnev to request an interview. When they put me on hold, I was astonished by the music being pumped down the line. It was Frank Sinatra singing Anything Goes. As I sat there listening to Old Blue Eyes, it suddenly dawned on me. This song encapsulates today's Russia because this indeed has become a country where anything goes. If someone had told me a year ago that Russia would annex the Crimea, I wouldn't have believed them. Even President Putin himself had told the world he wouldn't do that. But he did. After all these days, anything goes. Having said that, few people had expected Moscow to arm, encourage and bankroll separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine, let alone send Russian soldiers across the border to fight alongside them. But it did just that. Once again, it seems that anything goes. And when anything goes, well, the most bizarre things start to happen. The other day I witnessed a group of Muscovites on the street taking off their T shirts. All their tops had Western signs and symbols on them. And what did they do with the removed items? They exchanged them for Russian T shirts that some activists were handing out, a sort of patriotic top swap. The brand new, more politically correct clothes featured images of intercontinental ballistic missiles and catchy slogans like this rocket isn't scared of sanctions. But in a country where anything goes, reporting becomes more difficult. This month, something happened which I'd never experienced before in my 13 years covering Russia in for the BBC. We traveled to a village near Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea to interview Oksana. Her brother Konstantin was a Russian soldier, and this summer he told his sister he was being deployed to Ukraine. Three weeks later, he was dead. The question of Russia's military presence in eastern Ukraine is a sensitive one. Moscow continues to deny sending any soldiers across the border to fight. On leaving Oxana's village, we were stopped briefly by the police. They wanted to know who we were. Then we drove on to Astrakhan, parked the car and went to have lunch. Later, when we were walking back to the vehicle, at least three men ran up and attacked us. They hit our cameraman. They grabbed the camera, smashed it on the road and sped away in a getaway car. That evening, our news crew and our local driver were summoned to the police station. The questioning seemed to take forever. We were there for more than four hours. When we finally got back to the car, it was clear that in our absence someone had been inside. All our equipment bags and cases had been repacked and neatly stacked, and copies of Oxana's interview had been destroyed. All that effort to stop us getting the story out, and all in vain because we'd fed the material to London earlier in the day. While we were having lunch over the next few days, all kinds of imaginative articles appeared on the Russian web about what had happened to us in Astrakhan, more fairy tale than fact. Some of the authors suggested that the BBC crew had been drunk and had started the fight. Others asserted that the whole sad story had never happened. Our claims were just a provocation. Perhaps I shouldn't be too surprised. After all, in Russia, increasingly, events are turned upside down, back to front, inside out, until they bear little resemblance to what actually happened. And that is another reason why Anything Goes seems a suitable anthem for modern Russia. In those immortal words sung by Mr. Sinatra, the world has gone mad today, and good is bad today, and black is white today and day is night today.
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Steve Rosenberg in Moscow, Sweden's new Prime Minister, Stefan Lefin, is expected to announce details of the country's new government shortly. It's thought his right wing Social Democrats will enter into an alliance with the Greens. And there's little doubt that subjects like mass immigration and unemployment will top the incoming administration's agenda. But the new government also faces calls from the country's Sami, or Lapp, population who want mining in their traditional grazing pastures in the north to be severely restricted. Stuart Hughes says they see it as a fight for survival.
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In a clearing deep in a forest of pine, birch and spruce trees, Henrik Blinn points out two crescent moon shaped marks on the ground, reindeer hoofprints pressed into the mud after the previous day's rainstorm. You don't see them, but they are here, he whispers conspiratorially. They're probably watching us now. We're standing next to a long, shallow pit strewn with large boulders. It's here at the site of the proposed Kallak iron ore mine that a British company, Beowulf Mining, has been carrying out test drilling for iron ore. But for Henrik, a campaigner and local politician, the drilling operation is an act of sacrilege. The land tells the story of our culture, he says. We haven't left many marks, and some people say that's proof there's no history of people living here when it should be the opposite. The cultural and ethnic nation known as Sapmi crosses the territorial boundaries marked out on maps of northern Europe. Sapmi is often depicted as a vast expanse of tundra, but it's home to around 2 million people of varying Russians, Norwegians and Swedes, Sami, Tornadalians, Vens and Finns. The Sami of Sweden believe their government is siding with the mining industry to depict Sapmi as an empty wilderness in order to plunder and destroy their ancestral land in the short term pursuit of profit. That's why an off the cuff remark by the head of Beowulf Mining was caused such outrage at a conference in Stockholm. Clive Sinclair Poulton, a Cambridge law graduate whose generous mane of grey hair and neatly clipped beard have earned him the nickname the Silver Bullet, said he was often asked what local people were going to say about the Kallak project. I show them this picture and I say, what local people? He said, displaying a photograph of the pristine northern Swedish landscape. What local people? It's a question that Henrik says renders his people invisible, wiping them off the map, writing them out of history. Clive Sinclair Poulton insists his comment was taken out of context and was meant simply to highlight the low population density in northern Sweden compared to many other parts of Europe. But the damage to relations with the Sami has been significant and long term. The mining industry says it wants to create tens of thousands of jobs, bringing prosperity and skills to struggling rural areas. Beowulf Mining says it will employ Sami workers at Calak, giving them an income that will allow them to continue reindeer herding. But such well meaning promises have uncomfortable echoes from the past. In the early 17th century, conscripted Sami laborers were forced to haul ore by reindeer at the Narsafjal silver mine near the Norwegian border. Those who refused were dropped into freezing lakes as a punishment. Kalak has become an iconic struggle for Sami campaigners, a symbol of what they see as an escalating colonial takeover of indigenous land by outside interests. At the site of the proposed mine, a protest camp sprang up. Last summer. It became a focus of resistance until the police and workers with bulldozers moved in to clear the barricades. During the clearance operation, Henrik Blinn took a photograph of a police officer unintentionally treading on the Sami flag. The circle and stripes of the flag represent much the Sami hold dear the sun and the moon, water and nature and the colours of their national costume. Its accidental desecration became another powerful symbol of Sami identity, seemingly being ground into the dirt under the boots of the authorities. The camp is deserted now, but some observers believe last summer's actions here marked a turning point. And the demonstrations over Kalak have forced the mining issue onto the agendas of politicians more than 600 miles away in Stockholm. As we leave Kalak and drive along the single track road winding out of the forest, Henrik predicts there'll be many more similar battlegrounds in the years ahead, where the competing interests of industry and indigenous rights collide. Sweden's leaders, he says, must make a simple decision over which is more important to economic growth or the Sami way of life.
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And that was Stuart Hughes. Myanmar, formerly Burma, this week gave permission for nine foreign banks to operate in the country, the first time they've been allowed in for decades. The authorities hope the move will encourage more overseas investment. For 50 years, this was a pariah state, a military dictatorship shunned by Western countries, but a partial opening up to democracy. The release from house arrest of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San SUU Kyi and a suspension of many Western sanctions have brought change. Forecasts of an immediate business boom may have proved premature. It's clear there's some distance to go before the economy can take off. There aren't enough skilled workers, the infrastructure is still creaking, and there's an urgent need for further reforms. Despite this, Charlotte MacDonald's been finding out that for many Burmese, the Quality of life is improving.
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As I climb up the unlit stairwell, I can hear my heart pounding from the exertion. Six flights up, two more to go. You should try carrying shopping and a couple of children, Twopy chuckles. We're walking up the dusty staircase to his flat on the top floor. The flat, when we finally get there, is large. There are several solid, dark, good quality wooden chairs arranged around a flat screen tv. In the corner is a desk with a computer, Facebook glaring out from the screen. Everywhere there are people and I can smell sweet and savoury scents of dinner cooking. Down the corridor, I'm welcomed by Twopy's British wife, Michaela. The two of them met working at an international school in Yangon. They now live here with their three children and Twopy's extended family. There are 14 of them in total. I'm told that as the eldest son, it's Twopy's responsibility to look after his parents and siblings. Come and take a look outside before it gets dark. I'm led out onto the balcony and shown the view of the city below. Busy streets, cars, buses and trucks with workers clinging on every side on their way home. I can see a hotchpotch of modern high rise blocks mixed up with decaying colonial buildings. Over there in that part, that's where Aung San SUU Kyi's father was assassinated, says Michaela. She tells me that when she first started coming here 10 years ago, policemen were stationed there, making sure people didn't loiter, presumably to stop the place becoming a focal point for protest. Back then, people didn't make comments about the government. If you went to a tea shop with your friends, you were careful about what you said. You just didn't know who was sitting behind you or who was listening to what you were saying, says Makeda. The day she saw people holding a peaceful, candlelit protest about power cuts undisturbed by the authorities, is when she knew the political repression was finally lifting. The road, she continues, used to be cluttered with old bangers. Every time Michaela took a taxi during the rainy season, water would come gushing up through the holes in the floor. The inside panels of the doors were often missing, and if you wanted to open the window, you'd have to ask the driver to pass the handle to you so you could wind them down. Now the roads are full of modern cars, mostly second hand Japanese ones. New hotels and apartment blocks are going up, and there are more international products. Five years ago, the couple decided to invest in a mobile phone. Together they pooled their money to buy one SIM card at the astronomical price of around £1,500. Today, you can get one for just one pound. But this is Yangon, the big city, the commercial capital. It's in its own bubble. 70% of Myanmar's population lives in the countryside. 2 had a very different life before coming to the city. We sit down to dinner, tucking into the various dishes on the table. The shredded chicken is cooked in garlic and ginger. The spices are freshly pounded with a pestle and mortar. Meat is expensive but always served when there are visitors. There's hot steaming soup, sliced vegetables and lots of rice. A dish of chilli is pounded with a little salt and lime. This the others add in small amounts to their plates as they eat. As we tuck in, Twopy tells me about his life growing up in a remote village in the north of the country. Life is very hard there, he says. There's no industry. People farm by hand. In a year, two's family made 200 pounds to live on. When he was 12, he started walking cows through the forest to sell over the border in India. The journey there and back took 10 days and he would earn £2.50 for this task. Eventually he went to India to study and ended up working in a school in Yangon. When his family came to join him in the city a few years ago, adjusting was a struggle. His mother had always cooked on a wood stove. For the first few months living in the flat, she was scared of the gas cooker. Mastering the remote control for the TV took time too. When Twampy's uncle first came here, he couldn't believe that there was an electric contraption to that could successfully wash clothes. He sat down in front of the washing machine and saw through an entire cycle before exclaiming with satisfaction, it is indeed true. The clothes really are clean.
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That's Charlotte MacDonald. Zimbabwe's making a determined bid to emerge after 14 years in the tourism wilderness. It's trying to turn the dusty town of Victoria Falls into a tourist hub for the whole of southern Africa. A new international airport is being built there with Chinese money. And there are plans to introduce a new single visa, which they say will allow entry to four countries. Some ministers in the ZANU PF government in Harare are now keen to improve relations with Europe and the us where there's a sense now that the worst of the repression has passed. As they say in Zimbabwe, it never reigns forever. But Chris Haslam tells us that for a solitary prisoner on an island in the Zambezi Prince, rain is the Biggest worry of all.
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I was standing on the deck of the Rukkamechi Safari camp, gazing across the Zambezi to the grey hills of the Zambia escarpment, when my guide pointed at a nondescript island in mid stream, a low blur of vetiveria grass. There's a baboon trapped over there, he said. He's been there three years. We call him Robinson. I'd come to Manor Pools national park for my money, the prettiest on the entire continent, to file a story about Zimbabwe's bid to attract more tourists. I'd met Tourism Minister Walter Muzembi, a favourite of Robert Mugabe's and a man tipped for the old man's job someday. And I'd met optimistic businessmen keen to attract foreign investment. I'd also listened to conservationists who'd pointed out that without funding from Zimbabwe's cash strapped government, tourist money was essential to fight the poaching gangs preying on the country's elephant herds. It was all compelling stuff, but an eight year old chacma baboon trapped on an island for three years, now that was a real story. In his former life, Robinson had been the alpha male of a troop of baboons living in the trees around Rukamechi camp. He had a reputation as a bold thief, a robber baron, adept at pilfering from the tourist tents lining the riverbank. He had a harem of wives, a horde of kids, and as the locals say, lg life was good. But then he washed up on the island. No one knows how the baboon was marooned. Some say he jumped into the river to escape lions or a predatory leopard. Others say he fell from a tree. And one school of thought is that with characteristic audacity, he simply walked across during the dry season when the river was particularly low. He's been in solitary ever since. A slim, graying chap with his tail dragging despondently behind him. He subsists on a meagre diet of grass roots and the occasional bird's egg. Most evenings his family comes to the riverbank and calls to him, urging him to, it would seem, to come home. But with 18 foot crocodiles guarding this African Alcatraz, an escape attempt would be suicidal. Zimbabwe's National Parks Authority has banned any rescue operation, arguing quite rightly that nature must take its course. But some tourists have defied the order. In the most recent attempt to save Robinson, a boat loaded with bananas was left moored on the island in the hope that the baboon's pilfering instinct would entice him aboard. The plan was then to rush the boat and cast off, trusting that Robinson's fear of water would be greater than his fear of humanity. But it didn't work. He came. He had a long look at the boat, but in the end he simply walked away, said safari guide Honest Sia. Wherever. Maybe his long incarceration has cured him of his criminal tendencies, he suggested. Sooner or later though, Robinson will either sink or swim. Upstream lies the Kariba dam, and if a heavy rainy season means they have to open the sluice gates, Robinson's island will be submerged. But he may not be the only victim. The Kariba is in a dangerous state. Opened in 1959, it was built on a seemingly solid bed of basalt. But in the past half century the torrents from the spillway have eroded that bedrock, carving a vast crater that has undercut the dam's foundations. Robinson has kept his head above water thus far because the authorities have been terrified to open the sluices. But engineers are now warning that without urgent repairs, the whole dam will collapse. If that happened, a tsunami like wall of water would rip through the Zambezi Valley, reaching the Mozambique border within eight hours. The torrent would overwhelm Mozambique's Kahora Bassa Dam and knock out 40% of Southern Africa's hydroelectric capacity. Along with the devastation of wildlife in the valley, the Zambezi River Authority estimates that the lives of 3.5 million people are at risk. As the sun sets and I sip my gin and tonic on the banks of the mighty Zambezi, the baboons come down to the water's edge and start calling. After a while, Robinson appears on the shores of his island. He sits and listens for a few minutes, then disappears back into the reeds. Maybe he knows that with a map changing catastrophe held back by a crumbling wall of 55 year old concrete just upstream, his prison island is as safe as anywhere around here.
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Chris Haslam with that story of marooned baboon Robinson, bringing this edition to a close. We'll be back on Saturday morning at half past eleven with more stories from around the world and I hope you'll join us then. Goodbye.