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From Our Own Correspondent
A Poet at War
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Foreign correspondents. Today: can a meeting of presidents halt the fighting in Why to...
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Hello from the. From our own correspondence studios at Broadcasting House in London, you've downloaded the latest
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edition of the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Hello. Talk's in Kiev today about a war few had predicted and fewer know how to stop. The morgues are full, neighbourhoods sealed off, no end in sight to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Why is it that the best English in Guatemala is spoken by ex jailbirds and we find out what's going on in Swiss politics, or rather what's coming off the German Chancellor Angela Merkel is in Kiev today for talks about the fighting between pro Russian separatists and government forces in Eastern Ukraine. Western countries, meanwhile, condemned the unauthorized entry there yesterday of a Russian aid convoy. Both Germany and the United States say it's a dangerous escalation. The pro Western leadership in Kiev blames Russia for orchestrating a separatist rebellion in the East, a charge Moscow denies. Steve Rosenberg says that despite the German leader's intervention, few believe the violence will cease anytime soon.
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This is the story of a poet. He's asked me not to reveal his name because like many people from Luhansk who've witnessed months of violence and bloodshed, he'd prefer not to attract attention. But of all the people I've interviewed in Ukraine over the last few months, it's the poet who's made the biggest impression on me. We first met last December. I traveled to Luhansk to find out what people in Eastern Ukraine thought about the pro EU demonstrations in Kiev. By then, the protests in the capital were huge, with hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets to condemn President Yanukovych and to demand change. 400 miles east, in the Russian speaking town of Luhansk, life felt so much calmer. There were no street protests, there was no sense of impending social unrest. But there was an air of resentment. Many people told me that the protesters in Kyiv should get off the streets and get back to work. Right now, it's us, the factory workers of Eastern Ukraine, who are keeping this country afloat. I heard words like these in many a conversation. The poet told me Europe was two faced. He couldn't understand how EU politicians were supporting Ukrainian nationalist groups that were knocking down statues of Lenin. The same groups, he said, that were making anti Semitic and anti Russian statements, where he asked, were Europe's moral values? Had she gone blind? Three months later, I was back in Luhansk. After the revolution in Kiev, the city was much more tense. Few people had a good word to say about the deposed president Viktor Yanukovych. But many were deeply suspicious of the new government. They condemned what they saw as attempts to demote the status of the Russian language. The day before I arrived, an angry crowd had stormed the the Luhansk regional administration building, demanding that the new governor, who'd been appointed by Kiev, resign. Once again, I met the poet. This time he sounded deeply pessimistic. He described what had happened in Kiev as a coup. Now, he said, the genie of nationalism was out of the bottle. That was five months ago. Since then, more than 2,000 people have been killed in eastern Ukraine and more than 340,000 forced to flee their homes, victims of a war few had predicted. And even fewer know how to stop. For a long time, the poet was silent. I heard nothing. But this week, I received an email from him with a poem. And I was so moved by it that I tried to translate it into English. And with his permission, I'd like to share some of it with you, because the poet paints such a vivid, shocking picture of what's happening right now in his hometown in Lugansk. And remember, this is happening in Europe. The devil fixes another meeting and then opening its big black mouth. Hatred explodes, kills and maims. And it seems that time is rushing backwards, not forwards. Back to the days of executioners at the gallows, back to the black and ignorance that foster war and resurrecting fears of death. Life, like a hound howls at the moon. The poet writes about the rockets raining down on Luhansk from clouds of hatred, each shell containing a message from hell that rips pictures and people to pieces. When the shells fly in, the angels fly away. Only the faintest echo of their song flickers in the flames. Today, Luhansk has been the scene of some of the fiercest fighting in this war between the pro Russia militants who seized the city and Ukrainian forces battling to take it back. Both sides have been accused of indiscriminate shelling resulting in civilian deaths. Kiev accuses Moscow of fanning the flames of rebellion and of supplying the militants with weapons. Russia says Ukraine is conducting a punitive operation against its own people. As for the humanitarian situation in eastern Ukraine, the International Red Cross describes it as critical. Thousands of people have no access to drinking water, medicine or electricity. The poet has little optimism in his words. Half the country is fighting, our towns destroyed to the core. The curse of war is on all of us now, forevermore.
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Steve Rosenberg. In eastern Ukraine, more than 1300 people are now known to have been killed by the Ebola virus. In West Africa, it's the largest ever outbreak in the region. Liberia is one of the country's worst affected. There was fighting in the capital, Monrovia, this week as security forces tried to seal off a neighborhood affected by the virus. Elsewhere, borders have been sealed, treatment centres have become dangerously overcrowded, and several airlines have suspended flights to the affected countries. Will Ross, who's in Nigeria, says Ebola's now dominating daily life across the region.
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Is there a problem? The man asked, seeing my microphone. It's a common question in Lagos whenever anyone sees a journalist in their neighbourhood. No problem, I shot back, hoping to be left to get on with an interview. But people knew why I was in the bustling suburb of Obalinde. A Liberian American man had died in the hospital across the road after flying into the country, already very sick with the Ebola virus. Several doctors and nurses caught it from him, and there's still a fear it could spread across this vast, chaotic city. Don't report on Ebola here, one man shouted. You'll scare people away and they won't want to spend money here. It was my first taste of the contagious panic the virus triggers. Scientists say the first victim of this Ebola outbreak was a 2 year old toddler in guinea last December. Since then, more than half the people who've caught it have died. But when international health workers first moved in, they were not always welcome. There were no go areas. We just didn't reach because we'd been threatened with violence, remembers Koki van de Velde, who headed from her home in Yorkshire to Guinea in April to work with the international charity Medecin Sans Frontiere. You might be wondering why people who'd come to help would face hostility. But the sanitation specialist, who has to dress head to toe in a protective suit, complete with face mask and goggles, sees exactly why people are suspicious of them. You go into their villages and you dress up like a spaceman, koki tells me. The one person who's sick in the village, you take away, then that person dies. You've sprayed chlorine everywhere and sprayed inside the house, which you say is going to cure the problem, she explains. And then, lo and behold, another five or ten people become sick. So they start thinking the spray you're using is spreading Ebola, Koki says, because relatives in guinea were not even allowed to see inside the body bags due to the risk of infection. People even started believing a rumour that foreign health workers were removing the organs from the dead people. To build trust, they had to start allowing Relatives to view the bodies in a very controlled environment. Despite all the challenges in guinea, the fight against Ebola has gone much better there than in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Liberia, where it's out of control. We woke up to find police and soldiers everywhere blocking the entrance to our township. Nobody can go out and nobody can come in, 65 year old Sorbo Bropleis told me by phone from his home in West Point, a slum in the Liberian capital Monrovia. It was put under quarantine after a clinic there was looted and alarmingly suspected Ebola patients walked out. The looters stole infected mattresses, but apparently their aim was to get the clinic closed down. They feared patients from other parts of the city would bring the virus to their neighbourhood. I've not seen a single person with a bowler here In West Point, Mr. Bropley told me, unaware that there have been cases there. Because of the quarantine, no one can get to work or buy food from the city's markets. Prices in West Point doubled overnight and facing food shortages, the government brought in emergency supplies. People were fighting on the street to get rice which they were giving out from the back of a truck, said Mr. Broplay. It was handled better during the civil war. Then the UN gave out the rice in an orderly way, he said, recalling the conflict that ended just over 10 years ago and caused long term damage in terms of healthcare and education. After her stint in Guinea, Koki of Medicine Sans Frontiere, went to work in Liberia, where she saw only a handful of Ebola patients survive because people were reporting their sickness so late. First of all our morgues were full, then we had to put people on top of people and then when there was no more room, the body bags were lined up outside, she recalls. When Koki recently left for the airport, she was reminded of how great the need is for a public awareness campaign. A senior bishop came on the radio. He'd phoned in to say that the whole thing was made up. There was no such thing as Ebola and it was just the government trying to get aid dollars. It's no wonder the virus is out of control in Liberia.
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And that's Will Ross in West Africa. It's proving to be a long hot summer on the southern border of the United States with Mexico. There's been a surge in the number of would be migrants from Central America. Many are detained and then sent home deported. Most come from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, some of the most violent nations on earth. Even before the current surge, thousands were being deported every week Adults, children and convicted criminals. In 2013, from Guatemala alone, more than 13,000 people who'd been incarcerated in US jails were sent back home. Linda Presley has been to Guatemala City to find out more about these returnees.
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A bandage is unravelling onto the grubby floor. We've been so deep in conversation, neither of us had noticed. When he does spot it, Luis is embarrassed. Sorry, he says, pulling an enormous great length of it out from one of the legs of his long skater shorts. I gotta keep it tight round my stump to get it ready for prosthetic limb, he explains. Luis is 42, an engaging storyteller with a wide smile who's more comfortable speaking English than Spanish. Oh, and he's a convicted killer with one leg. Luis grew up in California, taken by family in the 1980s to escape Guatemala's bloody civil war. Then a local gang claimed him and a different kind of internecine hatred dominated his life. Someone tried to kill him in a drive by shooting. Luis shot back. The guy in the car died and Luis went to prison. After 12 years, and now with a serious heroin habit, he emerged blinking onto a chartered international flight. Guatemala City. Back in his parents homeland, Luis struggled. He didn't understand the culture, didn't speak much Spanish and without heroin, turned to alcohol and crack cocaine. It wasn't the life Luis wanted. So after four years of getting by badly, he decided to head back to California. He travelled on top of a goods train, one of the monster locomotives known by migrants as La Bestia, the the beast that chugged north from the Mexican border with Guatemala up to the US frontier. Luis tells me it was all going quite well. They'd passed Mexico City and he'd made a good friend. Thank God he had, because when Luis fell from the train severing his leg, that friend flagged down a car and got him to hospital. Once Luis was out of danger, he was again deported to Guatemala. It's at this point in Luis's story that a man with slightly mad eyes comes to lean against the doorless door frame and stares wordlessly at us. It's then I remember where we are. Luis is lodging in a drug rehabilitation centre and we're perched on small plastic stools in the slender space between two banks of three storey wooden bunks, beds constructed by carpentry enthusiasts rather than experts. He's clean now, but Luis has spun through at least 12 different drug rehabilitation centres in Guatemala City. They're mostly run by Evangelical and Pentecostal pastors or born again former addicts who believe only Jesus Christ can provide the answer to addiction. Many of these men, and the inmates too, are deportees themselves, with histories not dissimilar to that of Luis, minus a severed leg. There are dozens of these facilities in Guatemala. Some are humane, others are terrifying. More than once, Luis was swept off the street by groups of men working for a rehab centre. Once you're in there, you're captive, Luis says. He's seen people beaten, scrubbed with bleach, made to eat off the floor. And when an addict is detained, only the director of the centre or family can sanction their release. There are people who have been locked up for months, years even, in Guatemala City. I try to get inside the rehab centre with a most notorious reputation for abuse. The barred door onto an ordinary street is locked with a heavy padlock inside. A man who must be the biggest Guatemalan in the world lopes towards me when I call. Hello. His biceps strain against a tight white T shirt. I'm a bit distracted by my own reflection in his aviator shades and burble something in Spanish about wanting to talk to the director. The biggest Guatemalan in the world answers so politely in perfect Southern Californian. The director's not here, he says very definitely. I leave a card, but I can see this is a total non starter. In the centre where Luis is lodging now, the regime is benign. He pays a low rent and can come and go. And Luis has a job. Deportees are sought after by one of Guatemala's few growth industries, call centres. So he spends all day talking English to the American customers of a cell phone company. He loves it, especially the small talk about music, food, all the things he misses about his former life in California. I ask Luis if the company knows he has a serious criminal record. No, he says, but it's not a secret either. Everyone knows that the people who speak the best English in Guatemala are former U.S. jailbirds. The job helps keep his homesickness at bay. Luis knows he probably won't go back to the us, so he's aiming, he says, for a normal life here in Guatemala, free from addiction, with a job, girlfriend, somewhere proper to live and a new leg.
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Linda Presley there, and you can hear more from her travels in Guatemala in next week's Crossing Continents. That's on Thursday morning here on Radio 4. It's been another turbulent week in the world of Pakistani politics, with huge demonstrations outside Parliament and demands for the Prime Minister to step down. Rob Crilly's been reporting from there for more than four and a half years. He's travelled the length and breadth of the country, covering political crises and much else besides. He says he was greeted at every turn with samosas and cups of tea, the sort of hospitality that belies Pakistan's reputation for extremism. But as he prepared to leave for new reporting opportunities elsewhere, he told us there was one thing he wouldn't miss, and that was the country's state run airline.
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The steward was trying to avoid me. 20 minutes into the red eye from Heathrow to Islamabad and we were off to a poor start. I'm terribly sorry, but I don't think my video is working. I half apologised, half complained. Nor my reading light or call button I could have added. The mustachioed man in the Pakistan International Airlines uniform sounded unsurprised. We'll reset the system, he said in a voice that didn't encourage hope. Three resets later and we were somewhere over central Europe. The video screen remained blank. With seven hours to go, I was sitting in the dark. I couldn't read my book. And worst of all, for an Englishman nursing a gripe, without a working call button, there was no way even to complain properly. It's hard to imagine now, but the airline was once the pride of Pakistan. Its history is entwined with that of the nation whose flag it carries. From the bright dawn of independence to the bloated years of corruption and today's Taliban threat, its fortunes have waxed and waned and then waned again. These days it only ever makes headlines for the wrong reasons. One of its pilots was arrested in Manchester last year for turning up drunk. A plane was diverted to London, Stansted warplanes on either wing after two rowdy passengers tried to storm the cockpit. No wonder that among my friends in Pakistan, I'm among the few that don't choose the glitzy Gulf Airlines. While they have to survive a punishing departure hour and a layover in Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Doha, they can at least get a drink. Instead, I endure the vagaries of Pia, variously nicknames perhaps I Arrive or Please inform Allah. It began life at independence. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, knew any self respecting nation needed an airline. One of its first acts was to fly Hindus in one direction, Muslims in the other. As Partition, the division of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, turned nasty in 1947, any Pakistani of a certain age can reel off its achievements. It flew the first jetliners in asia in the 1960s. Its stewardesses wore uniforms designed by Pierre Cardin and its planes were the first to show films in the early 80s. When Dubai's sheikhs decided they wanted an airline, they turned to pia, leasing two of its planes and their crews for the first Emirates flights. But while their airline is conquering the world, PIA has slumped. Today it is burning cash. A case study in mismanagement. Its three aged long haul jumbo jets now regularly fly the short hop from Islamabad to Karachi. Chaotic schedules and poor safety records mean they can't fly longer routes, a colossal waste of fuel. About a third of its planes are unserviceable. Dozens of flights are cancelled each week. Things, though, may be about to change. A business minded government was elected last year on a promise to revive Pakistan's flatlining economy. There are big plans for the airline. I met the man in charge of the overhaul, Captain Shujat Azeem, for a cup of tea. He had the air of a man who had exhausted his capacity for surprise. And I don't mean good surprises. He has already sacked staff who lied about their qualifications, cut unprofitable routes and shut ticket offices around the world, including Chicago. We don't have flights there, he says, rolling his eyes. I don't know why we had offices there. He does know PIA has been run like a club, he explains, providing free flights to friends and relatives of ministers. Its swollen workforce is an aviation industry joke. It has 772 staff per plane. That's four times more than rivals. Captain Azeem has begun renewing the ageing fleet with the latest fuel efficient planes. And as the only airline flying direct to London, he has a market of a million British Pakistanis to draw on within a year. He wants to sell a chunk of the company. Who might be interested? I ask, wondering aloud about the sort of risk taking entrepreneur required. Which going to write to Richard Branson, he says without missing a beat. You know what? I wish him well. But Pakistan has a knack of interfering with best laid plans. Taliban gunmen stormed Karachi airport a few weeks ago. No aircraft were damaged, but airlines are understandably reluctant to lease planes and personnel to Pakistan. Worse, a PIA flight was hit by six bullets as it arrived in Peshawar. One female passenger died. So when I leave Pakistan after four and a half years reporting on the ups and downs of a country mired in terrorism and economic decline, I'll be wondering whether a new government can make any difference. Oh, and this time I'll be flying Emirates.
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And that was Rob Crilley. Now, with so many ghastly things going on around the world, you might well be asking whatever happened to the silly season? Can we no longer rely on August to provide us with a stream of amusing trivia, which at other times of the year would struggle to qualify as news items. At least, as is common at the height of summer, we now have a juicy sex scandal the media can get its teeth into. And this year, it's come from an unexpected source. Switzerland. Now, the stereotype of that country features mountains and cuckoo clocks, melting cheese and gnome like bankers. It's the sort of place where nothing much happens, isn't it? Well, not this summer. As Imogen folks can tell us what's
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going on in Swiss politics, or rather, what's coming off. Throughout this cool, damp summer, hot and steamy stories have been emerging from Switzerland's Parliament in the form of some very graphic naked selfies. First, there is a series of selfies from a parliamentary secretary taken in her office inside Parliament. Were they stolen from her, like, leaked to the public by an unscrupulous colleague? Why, no. She posted them on Twitter herself, admitting all the while she was terrified one of her parliamentary co workers might find out. Well, since she has 11,000 followers on Twitter, that didn't take long. And the pictures, of course, found their way into the papers. There's no disguising the familiar stayed matronly shape of the parliamentary furniture in the background. Although once those pictures reached the media, that was the only shape that was recognisable. Since everything in the foreground was so graphic, it had to be pixelated into invisibility. The case caused a brief debate in Switzerland. Was it permissible to take such pictures at work? Surely, some argued, taking photos of yourself naked was a private matter. But quicker than you might drop a hat, or indeed any other item of clothing, her bosses decided the secretary's behaviour was inappropriate and she was divested of her job. But the matter didn't stop there. This week, a Swiss member of Parliament and city mayor has also been found taking dubious selfies. This is a man who regularly adorns the studios of the political chat shows. He's a darling of the left. He's a man we've all interviewed, but now we know far more than any of us wanted to about him. He has been sending worryingly revealing pictures of himself via WhatsApp to an online friend. Some of the pictures were taken and sent in his mayor's office. One was even sent from the debating chamber of the Swiss Parliament, although, we're told, reassuringly, the picture was actually taken somewhere more private. Unfortunately, perhaps for this man, his pictures and the more than suggestive texts that accompanied them were kept by his online friend. Even after the relationship cooled, he wanted them back. She didn't oblige. He called the police, and soon enough the story was all over the papers. And so a humbled politician appeared at a packed press conference on Tuesday morning, tears in his eyes, voice breaking, he apologised. He told us he was thoroughly ashamed. We were beginning to feel sorry for him, until he hastened to add that the WhatsApp exchanges hadn't been about sex at all. Oh no. He and his friend had been having, he said, an intellectual conversation about a book project on erotic fantasies. At this point, a muttered chorus of pull the other one could be heard from the assembled media. So what do these cases tell us about Swiss politics? Are they even more boring than we suspected? Is removing their clothes and taking photographs the only highlight in the everyday tedium of Swiss politicians and their staff? Interestingly, the Swiss media are now engaged in an intense bout of soul searching about whether selfiegate should have been reported on at all. In Switzerland, the the domain known as the privatswerer is still, to many, sacrosanct. It means more than the usual definition of the right to privacy. It's a belief that what happens in your home or outside of work is for you alone and no one, not the police, not the social services and certainly not the media should have access. This attachment to personal privacy is at the root of all sorts of aspects of Swiss life, from banking secrecy to the slowness with which Switzerland introduced laws against domestic violence. Your money and the way you treat your wife are, the thinking goes, your business and no one else's. In fact, what this case suggests to me is that there is still one rule for powerful men and another for ordinary women. The parliamentary secretary was suspended from her job, the politician and expects to stay in Parliament. We'll all have forgotten about it in a couple of weeks, said one loyal colleague. Personally, I'm not so sure. Just as Bill Clinton and cigars remain inextricably linked for many, I think it's going to be hard to watch this politician debating in Parliament and not remember him sitting in his mayor's office with his smartphone, wearing only a T shirt.
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Imogen folks in Bernard and with that picture of the senior side of Swiss politics, we've reached the end of another edition. I'll be here again next Saturday morning with more from correspondence far and wide. Until then, goodbye.