← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
'A Win-Win Outcome'
00:28:24
The stories behind the week's news: what's led to this outbreak of fighting in Yemen?...
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Narrator/Presenter
Thank you for downloading the latest edition
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Kate Adie
of BBC Radio's from our own correspondent, the best in news and current affairs storytelling. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Host/Presenter
Hello. Today, Yemen torn apart by war. But how did an impoverished group of tribesmen get the training, the weapons and the money to take over half the country? A daunting task ahead for the new President of Nigeria. His people have high expectations. A million Chinese millionaires. Is it an awkward statistic for leaders who still preach the virtues of socialism and equality? And the smell, the taste. No milk, no sugar. No need. We sip what's arguably the most delicious coffee in the world? The United Nations Security Council is to meet later today to discuss a Russian proposal for a pause in the Saudi led intervention in Yemen. Moscow says it's acting out of humanitarian concerns. According to the UN, more than 500 people have been killed in the past two weeks, 90 of them children. There's been house to house fighting in Aden. Rebels have stormed the Presidential palace. There have been repeated airstrikes. The Saudi led coalition is helping forces loyal to President Hadi who are trying to beat back an advance by Shia Houthi rebels. Frank Gardiner's in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
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Frank Gardner
The Romans had a name for Yemen. They called it Arabia Felix Happy Arabia because of its lush rain fed mountain scenery. Today that epithet sounds tragically inappropriate. Already the poorest country in the Middle east, wracked by soaring unemployment, dwindling oil and water reserves and home to the most dangerous branch of Al Qaeda, now Yemen is being torn apart by by a war of many battlefronts. The Saudi led airstrikes began last month, raining down precision guided missiles on a rebel group called the Houthis who swept down from their mountain stronghold in the far north six months ago, taking town after town and pushing out the UN recognized President Hadi. That alarmed the Saudis and the other Gulf Arab states especially as they suspect the hand of Iran as being behind the Houthis. Spectacular blitzkrieg. How else Saudis keep saying to me, could an impoverished group of tribesmen get the training, the weapons and the money to take over half the country? There is a sectarian angle here too. The Houthi rebels are Zaidi Shias representing about a third of the population. The Saudi rulers are suspicious of Shias, many of whom look to Iran for spiritual leadership. Saudi Arabia is a predominantly Sunni Muslim country and the Saudis are starting to think they're getting encircled by proxies of Iran wherever they look in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and now they think Yemen. But in Fact, the Houthis largely owe their military success to someone much closer to home. They formed an alliance of convenience, a sort of pact with the devil, with the very man who tried to bomb them out of existence. Five years ago, Ali Abdullah Saleh ruled first North Yemen, then a unified Yemen for 35 years until he was forced out of power by the Arab Spring protests. He refused to believe that Yemen was better off without him, so he set about wrecking the peaceful political transition of power that Yemen's friends had worked so hard to engineer. Whole units of the Republican Guard remained loyal to him. Bombs went off and towns were fought over. President Hardy, who replaced him, an elderly, genial southerner, has been no match for Saleh's machinations. He must be ruined the day he agreed to let his predecessor stay on in Yemen. As president, Saleh fought six short wars against the Houthis until it ended in an uneasy truce. Now he's cynically using them to destroy those who he sees as usurping his power. The Houthis are fierce, effective fighters, used to living on little in the black volcanic mountains, the that straddle the Saudi Yemeni border. When I visited them in their stronghold city of Saida, my girlfriend and I were woken on our first morning by a burst of heavy machine gun fire from a pickup truck out in the street. It is celebration, said the man on reception, unfazed. Later we met a pair of brothers who took us out to the mountains to show off their skills with a Kalashnikov, chewing the narcotic cut leaf and racing across the desert in a beaten up old car. They thought it was the biggest joke to swap places behind the wheel while driving at breakneck speed. Their shooting was every bit as wild as their driving, and before long, a farmer emerged, shouting and cursing. What the hell are you doing? He said. Bullets are coming down all around my sheep. I have no idea what dizzy heights those two rose to after that in Yemen's tribal hierarchy. But the Houthis and their allies are now in control of most of the important parts of Yemen, despite more than a week of airstrikes. If those fail to dislodge them, then the Saudis have not ruled out a ground invasion. But everyone knows that carries enormous risks of getting bogged down into a vulnerable army of occupation. Instead, the Houthis face a more dangerous the jihadists of Al Qaeda. The jihadists are Sunni fanatics, and they hate all Shias, including the Houthis. In Yemen, Al Qaeda seemed to be the only force capable of matching the rebels on the ground. On Thursday, their ranks were swollen by a jailbreak of dozens of convicted Al Qaeda fighters. Soon they will be rallying the Sunni tribes to join them and fight the Houthis from the north. And all the while, the Americans look on from afar in despair. Until just a few weeks ago, they thought they had a reliable partner in President Hadi. President Obama even held up Yemen and as a shining example of a counterterrorism partnership. Now that partnership has crumbled to dust, and so too have Yemen's immediate hopes of emerging from this intractable nightmare.
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Host/Presenter
Frank Gardner in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. Now, it was apparently a win, win outcome. That, at least was the verdict of the Iranian foreign minister. As a framework agreement on Iran's nuclear program was finally announced on Thursday evening, President Obama said the deal, the full details of which have still to be agreed, made the world a safer place. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had a different view. The agreement, he said, threatened his country's existence. The Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, insists his country will honour its part of the framework deal as long as others do the same. Under the agreement, Iran has promised to cut by more than two thirds the number of centrifuges it uses to enrich uranium. Lee Doucet was at the talks in Lausanne.
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Lise Doucet
There's something about the setting serene, sumptuous, Swiss a place where snow capped Alps rise majestically against cool blue Lake Geneva. There's something about the history. The elegant Beau Rivage hotel, the beautiful shore. Its very name conjures up a chronicle of privilege and power. Its doors have never shut since 1861. Many have glided through them. Glamorous guests like Coco Chanel and Victor Hugo, who adored this elegant escape. And diplomats of the day who fashioned the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne that saw an end to the Ottoman Empire. And there's something about this time, a time when, on not so distant shores, the Middle east is engulfed in terrible torment. So scientists and diplomats from six world powers in Iran sat down again to talk, to talk for eight long days, and often long into the night, about one of the biggest fault lines in the region, Iran's nuclear program. When so many journalists sit in wait for so long, they search for stories. But in keeping with great traditions of grand hotels, the Beau Rivage seamlessly served up a menu of metaphors. When this great game of diplomacy began, an outsized chess set on a finely mown lawn furnished a fitting backdrop for finely suited delegates strolling past, plotting their next moves. And when accusations were hurled that the Ball was in the other court. Europe's tennis federation took over our press rooms for a gala evening. And then, as the talks entered their final frantic hours, a parade of red caravans lumbered past the hotel's elegant facade. The Swiss circus had come to town. You couldn't make it up, but then why would you? Everything is here, including more history in the making. Not since the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, after the First World War, had America's top diplomats negotiated for so long on foreign soil. This time it was 71 year old John Kerry, the Secretary of State who stayed the course in the most modern of ways. He cleared his diary to give this high stakes diplomacy its very best chance. And almost every day he would take to the streets in dark black lycra and bright yellow helmet to cycle away the stress with his bodyguards. China's Foreign Minister Wang Xi did the same in his white jogging gear. And Iran's top diplomat, Javad Zarif, went for walks, brisk ones, as he ran the gauntlet of journalist who swooped upon him. He skillfully used these snatched moments to declare to the world pressure would never work. Iran, he said, wanted respect. The real negotiations went on behind closed doors, inside a beau rivage of belle epoque splendor, inside an unprecedented process. There have been no diplomatic relations between Iran and the United States since the American hostage crisis that followed the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Even two years ago, during earlier talks, US and Iranian diplomats didn't meet one on one. Now Mr. Kerry and Mr. Zarif spend hours on their own, including a marathon eight hour session that lasted until 5:30am on Thursday and also broke a record in American diplomacy. Their top scientists also met for hours on end, two men who went to the same American university at about the same time whose paths brought them here to these eight days that broke a deadlock and the talks almost broke down. But the teams, also from Europe, Russia and China too, knew they'd never been so close to closing the gaps. No one wanted to pull away. And then suddenly the pieces came together. The elements to prevent Iran from building a bomb, the requirements to lift sanctions. So they all left their historic hotel to announce the news at the most modern of sites, a high tech campus, the Rolex Learning Centre. And their words shot round the world in an instant. Social media in Iran exploded with relief and joy. But the critics in Tehran and in capitals across the Middle east and beyond took to Twitter and the airwaves to condemn it. This is a world where suspicion still runs deep over Iran's. Nuclear and political ambitions. It's also a world where a nuclear accord could offer a chance to resolve other disputes around the table. And so, after a bit of rest, the teams will retreat again to this most serene of settings to draft the final agreement on this most sensitive of issues. If they succeed, they will make history.
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Host/Presenter
And that was Lise Doucet in the Swiss city of Lausanne. Now, election defeats in Africa have sometimes in the past led to battles in court, fighting on the streets, even military crackdowns. But in Nigeria this week, the incumbent president, Goodluck Jonathan, graciously acknowledged defeat and picked up the phone to congratulate the winner, Muhammadu Bahari. Mr. Baha' I won't take office until the end of May. He'll spend the next few weeks building a government. The former military man had campaigned as a born again Democrat intent on cleaning up politics. Gabriel Gatehouse, who was in Nigeria for the vote, says the challenges facing him are formidable.
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Narrator/Presenter
What a beguiling thing is democracy for one day every four years. The streets of Lagos, usually so congested with traffic and are empty. That day is election day, and I found myself in a car, zooming along the highways and causeways of this throbbing, chaotic megacity, through the concrete and tarmac arteries that connect some of the wealthiest people on the planet to some of the poorest. It took just minutes to travel from the affluent neighbourhood of Ikoy to the wood and corrugated iron shacks of makoko dwellings that jut out on stilts from the lagoon. On any other day, that journey would take hours, inching along bumper to bumper. But speed changes your perspective. On this one day, it felt as if the clogged, sclerotic veins of the city had been cleared so that not only cars but wealth and power, too, might flow from one place to another and find its equilibrium. Outside a polling station, a tight throng of voters dressed in brightly coloured wraps and suits queued up. They jostled and shouted, haranguing the flustered election officials who were struggling with new biometric equipment that was designed to prevent fraud but wasn't always working. The sun was hot. Progress was slow. What do you want from your politicians? I asked a group of women. The first answer I got was light. Light, they agreed, was something they all desperately needed. Light and power. Nigeria is Africa's largest producer of oil and gas. The stuff bubbles up out of the ground in the southern Niger Delta, fuelling the continent's largest economy and making some people fabulously rich. And yet, in teeming Lagos, the lights are on barely six hours a day. For the wealthy, that means shelling out on a generator. Here in Makoko, it means no light for school children to study by. At night, it means no power for even a small fan to breathe fresh air into the tightly packed homes that line the stifling, mosquito infested lagoon. Look, said one woman, pulling back her wrap to reveal a nasty rash on her neck. She blamed the fetid air for her affliction. Any politician who could solve that problem would get her vote. What else did the people of Mokoko want on this one day when everything was up for grabs? Well, all the usual things that people in countries around the world. Jobs, health care, education, peace. In Nigeria, the big man decides everything, said a gentleman in a baseball cap who for a living procured visas for Nigerians wanting to leave the country to work. But today the little man decides. And that's why I'm here. And in all your years of voting, I asked him, in all the elections since the end of military rule, has any politician ever given you what you wanted? The answer, echoed in chorus by the women in the queue, was a resounding no. And yet here they all were, hemmed into line, shuffling forward towards the ballot boxes, beguiled by the hope that this time it would be different. And in a way, it was. Three days later, something happened that had never happened before. Not only did a challenger unseat a sitting president, but that president promptly phoned his opponent to congratulate him. Nobody's ambition is worth the blood of any Nigerian, goodluck, Jonathan said. And in so doing, he earned himself an honourable place in in a not too sizable club of African leaders who voluntarily relinquished power, having been defeated at the ballot box. Ah, democracy. A beautiful thing when it works. Mohammedu Buhari, the president elect, now faces a people with high expectations. The trouble for him is that changing the man at the top may do little to solve the country's myriad problems. There's a fundamental structural flaw at the heart of Nigerian democracy, and it is More than two thirds of the country's wealth comes from oil and gas. That resource is controlled by a tiny political elite. By contrast, less than 5% is contributed in the form of taxes paid by ordinary working Nigerians. What that means is that there's little real incentive for the politicians to see the voters as their paymasters. That is the challenge now facing Nigeria. Dismantling this system will be much trickier than unseating an incumbent president. But unless it does change, the people of Mokoko will keep coming back to the ballot box complaining about power cuts, health care and jobs. The road out of the slums will remain blocked and this democratic moment will turn out to have been just a mirage.
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Host/Presenter
And that's Gabriel Gatehouse. Now, which nation has the most super rich people? The United States, of course. But China's now in second position. Potentially awkward, you might think, for the rulers of this still communist country, the steady growth in some people's wealth there coincides with the rapid expansion of China's middle class. For the authorities, that means consumption is now more important than investment in driving economic growth. Linda Yu has been to Shanghai to look at how China's travel down the road to riches and where that leaves a society that still promotes the idea of
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Kate Adie
driving through the narrow streets of the French Concession, as it's called. I'm reminded of when Shanghai was known as the Paris of the East. Ritzy shops like Prada now share a block with older colonial era houses. They are a rarity in China these days when high rise apartments dominate city skylines. In the 1920s, foreigners mingled with Chinese in what was considered to be the most cosmopolitan city in Asia. Now with the rapid increase in wealth in China, it feels like a second gilded age. It's notable for a communist country that China has a million millionaires. And it's not just the number, it's the speed of the growth in wealth that's striking. A decade ago, there were only three billionaires in China. That number has grown by nearly 12,000%. That's a surprise in a country where the average income is the same as in Peru. The bond is another area which evokes a bygone era. A walkway that snakes along the Huangpu R. It is lined with imposing buildings, including the Peace Hotel, previously the Cathay Hotel. It has stood here for a century. It's where Charlie Chaplin mingled with George Bernard Shaw during its heyday in the 1920s. Now a different type of celebrity attracts the cameras. When Wang Jialin steps out of his Rolls Royce, people stop to photograph China's richest man. Because wealth was obliterated during the Cultural Revolution, billionaires like Wang Jielin are admired for creating their own fortun fortunes. He's China's largest property tycoon and intends to build his global entertainment business until it's bigger than Disney. His business took advantage of the opening of China's market in the 1990s and the rise of the new middle class. A remarkable half a billion people have been lifted out of poverty in a generation. It's their demand for offices, entertainment and Cinemas, which has made Wang Jialin one of the richest men in the world. But it's not just those on the Forbes rich list who enjoy the views of the Pudong financial district from the bars along the bond. One in every seven people in Shanghai is well off. This new generation of business owners also relies on selling to the middle class and on the digital revolution for their fortunes. These entrepreneurs catering to the new middle class are unlike earlier ones who made their money through real estate, which required good contacts with the Chinese government. But like Wang Jieling and others, others who took advantage of the privatization of real estate in China during the 1990s, this new generation of entrepreneurs is following the current shift in the economy towards consumerism. The government believes the middle class is a better bet as a force for growth than investment in real estate, which has led to serious concern over debt burdens. Unlike in other countries, most of the super rich in China made their money through their own business efforts rather than inheriting it. Their children are coming of age now. They've been dubbed the Fu Er Dai, which means the rich second generation. And whereas their parents tend to be frugal, the Fu Er Dai may work hard, but they play hard too. The media is often critical of their fast cars and extravagant spending. Their lavish lifestyles don't sit comfortably in a society that still talks about the virtues of socialism. Wang Jielin, whose son is one of those Fuadai, has blamed his son's Western education for him not being Chinese enough. Nanjing Road is a rare pedestrianized part of Shanghai that starts from the Bund. There's a crowded array of shops, hotels and cafes lining both sides of the street. It's busy at all times of the day. The newly minted middle class in China are finally enjoying a lifestyle that the west takes for granted. But there are beggars crouched next to the Mercedes limousines. Communist China has become as unequal as capitalist America. F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested that the very rich are different from you and me. But after this trip to uncover China's route to riches, it's clear to me that the rich, at least, are now much the same wherever you go in the world.
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Host/Presenter
Linda Yu in Shanghai Now, a glance down any high street here only underlines just how valuable a commodity coffee is. Every other premises seems to serve it. And of course, in a million more exotic ways than just plain old instant coffee long ago saw off tea as this nation's cuppa of choice. We now drink at least 70 million cups of it every day. And around the world, coffee is a mighty Money spinner. The global industry is worth at least $500 billion, a more even than gold. Peter Day, recently in Colombia, tells us it's been a recurring theme in his long years of radio reporting.
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Peter Day
It is a bewitching thing, coffee. For years I used to follow the daily twists and turns of the London coffee market, reporting on the tremendous Brazilian frost in July 1975, which devastated the crop and caused world coffee prices to triple in the two subsequent years. I remember the dark auction room at the Brazilian Porto Santos where the traders met to spar over the latest market offerings before retreating to their dusty offices to taste and sniff the export crop. I remember the not very interesting coffee I had years later in Saigon after the United nations taught an emerging Vietnam how to grow coffee, and their exports were soon equalling the global oversupply of beans on the world market, depressing prices for growers everywhere. When coffee growing nations met to try to agree on export quotas to keep prices from falling, I remember the exquisite coffee they used to serve at the International Coffee Organization, a sort of OPEC for coffee growing nations with its headquarters just round the corner from the BBC's Broadcasting House in London. I remember the terrific coffee I drank in Rwanda, where they were trying to tell the world about its surprising quality, grown in a scarred country haunted by genocide. I remember the superb roux served in Singapore in a cafe where they drip melting ice cubes over the ground coffee to produce a concentrated liquor which is then diluted with hot water. Takes 12 hours. Tastes terrific. I remember the very special indeed, Kopi lua served in Jakarta. The coffee berries are eaten by civets and processed in the digestive tract of the animal. When the beans are, so to speak, spat out at the other end, they're collected and sold at very high prices. The coffee was interesting but not exquisite. But the practice has led to charges of cruelty. As demand for this curious Indonesian novelty increases and demand is growing for coffee everywhere, it's said to be the developing world's second most valuable traded commodity, outstripped only by oil. Now, what occasioned this stream of semi consciousness was an encounter the other day with perhaps the most delicious cup of coffee I have ever drunk. Like Marcel Proust tasting that little cake, the Madeleine, my cup of finca de la soledade ural brought it all back. I happened to be in the city of Medellin in the hills of Colombia, the second largest coffee exporting nation in the world. Medellin is Colombia's second biggest city, but in recent decades it's been better known worldwide for its exports of another stimulant, cocaine. In 1991, Medellin was the most violent city on earth, with more than 6,300 murders as gangs fought over urban territory. But a long government war on the drug lords brought them down. The gangs retreated. The murder rate settled down. Medellin's mayors engaged in a comprehensive program of urban renewal, a new metro and cable cars to bring in slum dwellers trapped in distant poverty, striking new parks and civic buildings, cultivating new and tangible city pride. So I thought about all this as I looked out over a plaza in Medellin the other day, lined by 23 huge black sculptures by the locally born Fernando Botero, now the country's most celebrated artist. His hugely distinctive people look as though they're wearing fat suits trapped in ballooning corpulence. He's given many paintings and sculptures to his home of Medellin, and they are unforgettable, just like the coffee I was sipping as I looked out over Botero Plaza from the cafe called El Laboratorio de Cafe, the coffee laboratory, where they serve what are said to be some of the finest brews in this famed coffee region, though brew is the wrong word. A precise barista weighed out the beans from a named finca, or estate in the regional hills. She ground them, not too fine, and then decanted them in a filter using water at 90 degrees Celsius, certainly not boiling. She poured it out in tiny amounts from a thin stemmed kettle and over the coffee, waiting for it to pass into the glass pot before adding a little bit more. And then the savoring as it was poured into the cup. The smell, the taste. No milk, no sugar, no need. It was delicious, quite delicious. A sudden rainstorm broke over this city of perpetual spring, as the Colombians call it, and decades of coffee memories came flooding back as I lingered over one of the coffeest moments I've ever experienced.
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Host/Presenter
Peter Day there, particularly enjoying that Colombian cup of coffee and bringing this edition to a close. More stories from correspondents around the world next Saturday. Please join us. Goodbye.