← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
An Unfinished Revolution
00:28:07
As speculation continues about who's won the election in Libya, Rana Jawad in Tripoli...
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- [00:00]
A
You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent. You can hear the version of the programme we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our site at BBConline. But here's the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
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B
Today, China's economy slows down. Now its leaders must manage expectations without being swept from power themselves. Why? Voters in Libya seem to have bucked the trend and chosen not to elect the Islamists. How crime, corruption and a culture of impunity have infected every corner of life in Honduras. And we learn that saliva's big in the beauty business in Malaysia. And now the market is being flooded by counterfeit spit. The question for economists this weekend is how hard will the rest of the world be hit by the deepening economic slowdown in China? The west was hoping that a robust China spending freely would power revivals around the globe. Figures released yesterday show there's still growth in its economy. But the boom in full swing five years ago is today just a distant memory. This puts China's leaders under intense pressure. While trying to stimulate growth, they also need to prevent job losses and soothe political tensions. Michael Bristow has just left after living there for more than seven years. It is, he reckons, a country in the middle of an unfinished revolution.
- [01:24]
C
In the far north of China, in a province called Heilongjiang, there's a small town called Double River Farm. As its name suggests, it's a place where two rivers meet as they wind their way across a massive expanse of flat land. Tree lined roads run arrow straight, flanked by fields of wheat, maize and rice. The town's nothing much to look at. One main street with single storey homes crammed into lanes behind. But Double River Farm has changed dramatically. Just a few decades ago, it had just one shop which had very little to offer. Now there are hundreds selling everything from high heel shoes to veterinary medicine. There's even a school offering English lessons. This transformation of one small town is being replicated across the country. It's a change that's instantly visible to anyone who's spent even a short time in China. When I first arrived here more than seven years ago with my wife, a baby and two suitcases, we came in through what was then Beijing's main airport terminal. It has since been replaced. We left through a new sprawling building that from the air looks like a crouching dragon. But the economic boom has made China more complex and less unified, something that's also on show at Double River Farm. I had lunch with a 50 year old woman who held her cigarette between two stumps that were one's fingers. Four digits on her right hand were cut off in a farming accident seven years ago. It's a day I'll never forget, she said. Since then, she hasn't been able to work properly. She's officially registered as disabled, but hasn't received any compensation. Others in the community complain that their pensions are too low. Some of them recently travelled to Beijing to present their argument. But they say they were kidnapped before they got there and brought back home. When a top official recently visited the town, it was kept secret. The authorities were worried that angry locals might use the event to stage a demonstration. The complaints in Double River Farm are often heard in China and suggest the profits made over the last three decades haven't been spread out equally. Tensions frequently boil over. Every year there are thousands of riots as people vent their frustrations. The government is the one thing that hasn't changed in China. The country is still ruled by an elite and secretive group of Communist Party leaders who think repression is the best way to deal with those who are dissatisfied. But surely they'll have to find a better way of managing society's rising expectations and growing inequalities. A better way to govern a population that's forgetting the hard times of the last century. There's a deeper problem too. During the first 30 years of communist Party rule, there were disastrous political campaigns that left millions dead. The last 30 have been about rebuilding the country, making it strong and rich. But what about the next 30? As the magazine editor Hong Kong said to me a few weeks ago, they asked us to make money and we did. But how much is enough? The future is something the Communist Party doesn't want to talk about. It might start a national debate that could end up with it being swept from power. So change continues, while no one knows where it might lead. For people who used to have faith, even if it was in a now discredited political system, believing in nothing other than making money is sometimes hard. A few days before I left China, the chain on my bicycle broke and I stopped at a roadside repair shop to get it fixed. They're getting harder to find now. Beijing citizens are switching to cars. An elderly woman was already there. Her electric cart had a punctured inner tube and was tipped on its side. She was on the phone to her son. The bicycle repairman had told her she needed a new tire, but the son had said not to bother, just to get the inner tube patched up. The tyre probably didn't need replacing. The son had told his mother. And a new one would no doubt be fake, not a real brand. No one trusts anyone these days, the elderly woman told me. That might be an exaggeration, but it's a sentiment you hear a lot in China. The country's leaders have achieved amazing success in the last few years, bringing wealth and hope to a once poor nation. But what happens now? As I say goodbye to China, I'm still not sure I know where the country's heading. I'm not sure its leaders or its people do either.
- [06:09]
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And that was Michael Bristow. It's a week now since Libyans cast their votes in the first election since Colonel Gaddafi was driven from power. We're still waiting for the official result, but it seems Libya won't be following the trend of the Arab Spring, which has brought Islamists to power in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt and who might lead the country in the future. Few are betting against Mahmoud Jibril, the man who abandoned the Gaddafi administration and became the face of the Libyan revolution. Rana Jawad says he's being depicted as a unifying force for a country emerging from four decades of dictatorship.
- [06:45]
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Early on a hot summer morning, I sped along the coast near Tripoli, heading towards colleagues at a hotel across town. We'd all been trying to work out how and when the official results of Libya's first, first historic elections would be revealed. The Electoral High Commission has been announcing the results of the vote count in every constituency of every city and town. It's as if they're drip feeding us the figures. To be fair, they are being as mind numbingly transparent about the process as they can. So we're left doing a little maths, which most journalists seem hopeless at, and a little digging about with the biggest political parties and to gauge who was ahead of the game before the polls opened. So many foreign pundits, people working in intelligence and anti terror groups were sure Islamism would be the winner. And the result? Apocalypse for Libya. An interesting sight emerged to my left. The water was so calm it looked like a sea of olive oil glistening under the rising sun, disturbed only by children and young men splashing by the shore home, hoping for some respite from the heat. Their laughter echoed through the still morning air. Just a few cars passed by. This is still not a country of early risers. At that moment, it occurred to me that we, the journalists seemed to care more about the results of this election than many Libyans did. For many here, it was simply the act of making it to the polls on this historic occasion that mattered most. But what about those who do care? The ones who voted because their thirst for change was as desperate as your thirst would be after a day long summer trek on a camel to the Sahara. It was the women on polling day who stole the show, not just for their vibrant veils, designer sunglasses, retro handbags and very audible giggles. They may not have been the majority of voters, I can't really say because my arithmetic skills haven't developed in the past two minutes and there are no real statistics available, but they certainly seem to be turning out in jaw dropping numbers. Before the elections I met a Libyan woman, Fahima Masoudi, who bluntly stated Libyan women face five the father, the son, the husband, the brother and the working man. As a foreigner here who has observed and experienced the drawbacks of this male dominant society, I would also add the neighbour, the baker, the taxi driver and the teenager. But these are new times in Libya. Some peering in from abroad are wondering about the mindset of Libyans. Sipping from a cup of coffee, political science professor Sami Khashrusha, who is a member of the National Forces alliance party thought to be leading the polls, said, we need women, federalists, Islamists and liberals. A rainbow coalition, a government of national unity. Libyans, according to the professor, were for decades like horses with blinkers. Now those blinkers are off. They need a good cavalry officer to lead them. Another academic said Libyans had simply voted for stability and modernity. Mahmoud Jibril, the head of a coalition, the National Forces alliance, says he's not a man of ideologies, but a believer in what he calls futurology, a new ology to all of us. He is seen by many as a man with a plan. But perhaps more importantly for those who refuse to cast their ballots for any religious based parties, he was considered the safe choice. Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, a member of the justice and Construction Party, largely made up of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, tells me his party is paying the electoral price for recent violence carried out by extremist Islamist groups. Amirah, a trendy 20 something radio broadcaster with dark, flowing unveiled hair, puts it like we are all Muslims. But she explains that the problem is that the religious parties here seem to have an inflexible view of Islam and its Sharia laws and people don't trust them anymore. After what has seemed like the hijacking of revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, Libya appears to have gone what we could call centrist. It is undecided over the definition of liberal, and the religious based parties many call Islamists are still trying to assess where they went wrong here. The sweeping victories that Islamist parties witnessed in post revolution Tunisia and Egypt didn't happen here because Libyans are tired of being preached to. They simply don't want to be ordered around anymore, whether it's by an eccentric socialist turned brutal dictatorship like Muammar Gaddafi's or by a hardline religious grouping. To Sharia or not to Sharia? That was their question.
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That's Rana Jawad in Tripoli. The Central American state of Honduras has acquired an unwanted form of international recognition. According to the un, it has the highest per capita murder rate in the world. Last year, there were more than 6,000 killings in a country of little more than 8 million. To put that in some kind of perspective, Britain saw 700 murders in a population of 62 million. Much of the mayhem in Honduras is connected with the twin scourge of drugs and gangs. As Stephen Sack has been finding out, violent crime, corruption and a culture of impunity have infected every corner of Honduran life.
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When night falls in San Pedro Sula, residents retreat behind locked doors. The streets belong to the city's legion of stray dogs and to the gangs. The outlying neighborhoods, or barrios, are controlled by young men with guns. La planeta, for example, is the domain of the 18 gang. But cross the main highway heading north and you're quickly into territory held by Ms. 13, the other main player in Honduras theater of psychotic violence. My foray inside these barrios came courtesy of the Honduran police. I joined a night patrol into gang territory, which involved body armor, an arsenal of weapons and the sour scent of nervous tension. Within minutes of my settling into Captain Samir Rodriguez's truck, the police radio delivered news of another murder, the third since dusk. A body had been dumped in wasteland just 10 minutes drive away. We arrived to find the corpse of a man in his 20s, his hands and feet bad bound, his face badly beaten, and his bare chest punctured by half a dozen bullets. Two policemen gave the scene a perfunctory inspection and then used their mobile phones to take pictures of each other, crouching and grinning by the cadaver's feet. How will you handle the investigation? I asked Captain Rodriguez. Have you called in forensics? He snorted. Our entire region has just one forensics team, he said. They won't be coming here. There's no point. No one here will have seen anything, heard anything. We'll be lucky if we find the dead guy's name, let alone who killed him. One word gets to the heart of San Pedro Sula's. Hellish descent. Impunity. Those who cheat, steal, rape and murder know there is little chance they'll ever get caught or punished. The victims of crime know it too, and these days few bother to turn to the police. Take Marlene, for example. Her husband was recently gunned down after he refused to hand over his mobile phone to an armed attacker. She believes she knows who did it. An off duty policeman. In her words, an untouchable killer. 22 year old Sandra told me about her older brother. He went out for a meal with friends and never came back. Members of the MS.18 gang discovered he was from the wrong part of town. They tied him up, gouged out his eyes and shot him in the head. They wouldn't let me see the body, sandra told me. But in my imagination I see it every day. San Pedro Sula was not always like this. It's long been Honduras economic and business center, home to assembly plants churning out cheap goods for export to the US and beyond. But in the last decade, the city's legitimate economy has been undermined by cocaine and organized crime. Honduras geography, with a long coastline and a multitude of remote landing strips, and its enfeebled state institutions have made it a favorite staging post on the trafficking trail from South America to Mexico and the US Drugs money has bought off politicians, corrupted the police and empowered the local gangs. Deep in the Honduran hills, I met a young man who, for obvious reasons I cannot name, a native of San Pedro Sula who fled from home and family in an effort to break his ties to the MS.13 gang. In a soft monotone, he told me he'd first killed someone when he was 12 years old. For the following decade and a half, he was a trafficker, an assassin and an addict. He made hundreds of thousands of dollars and saved none of it. But his life changed when his girlfriend became pregnant last year. She told him she would rather he swept the streets than make money through drugs. So he tried to walk away from ms.13, but in gang culture, retirement is not an option. His own former brothers in arms shot him six times. Miraculously, he survived, but his family pretended he was dead. They arranged a funeral and dug a grave in San Pedro Sula. Now I can't go back, he told me. I'm a dead man walking. Maybe if you wait, I said, things will change. Go somewhere else for a few years, until this sickness has left your city. He gave me a thin smile. I won't live that long, he said.
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Stephen Sacker. And you can see the films he made in Honduras on the BBC News Channel early next week. Now, with its layer upon layer of history, Rome already offers its visitors an almost overwhelming variety of things to see and do. But it's about to put on show one more rather remarkable exhibit. Benito Mussolini's air raid shelter. The bunker was first opened to the public in 2006, but not long after had to be shut because of a build up of dangerous gases in its subterranean depths. The problem, we're told, has now been resolved and visitors can soon return. Alan Johnston reckons they'll come away with a fuller understanding of some of the dictator's final days.
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The Via Nomentana is an avenue. Like many others in Rome, taxis and motorbikes hurtle along it in the summer heat. But halfway down through a set of iron gates lies another world. The cool and the calm of the gardens of the Villa Torlona. A lawn shaded by palm trees rises up a slope and a path lined with flowers leads to the villa itself. Grand and imposing, for 18 years, this was the home of Benito Mussolini, his wife and their children. In this beautiful place, Italy's dictator Il Duce lived out his rise and fall. The villa is a museum now, and as you wander through its marble halls, it's easy to see that for a time, life here for the Mussolini's was very good indeed. The ballroom is lit by low hanging chandeliers and above them on the ceiling, painted angels go gliding through the heavens. Mussolini's bedroom is still much as he would remember it. You can almost see him throwing open the tall green shutters on a summer night, letting in any breeze that might emerge from the trees beyond the balcony. Black and white photographs show how Mussolini spent his days at the villa. Out on the fine white gravel of the driveway, you see him pictured as a swordsman practising his fencing, Il Duce's stocky frame presenting a rather large target for his coach. In one photo, he's on a white horse, easily clearing a jump on a riding track in the grounds. Another shows the dictator on the tennis court, wearing a cap to protect his bald head from the sun. But he's much more smartly dressed when we see him welcoming to his home an Arab diplomatic delegation. And in one of history's stranger encounters, Mussolini once entertained Mahatma Gandhi at the villa. We can only imagine what the famously restrained pacifist Indian was thinking as he sat and watched his host, this strutting, vain man consumed by a passion for power and conquest. But the dictator's grand ambitions had of course, set his nation on a route to defeat and disaster. As the war turned against him, he feared for the safety of his family. How could they be protected from Allied air raids? His own Italian forces had used bombers in the colonial war that he'd unleashed in Abyssinia in 1935. Now Mussolini worried that he himself might be targeted in the same way. At first, the answer seemed to lie in a cellar out in the garden. A steel door was fitted and beds put in. But there was a problem. If there was a sudden, terrifying attack. To reach the bunker, the family would have had to come out of the villa and run across a lawn for a moment. They'd have been exposed to the falling bombs. So instead, a new shelter was made. Inside the house. A basement was converted into a more sophisticated bunker. Mussolini was afraid the Allies might use gas bombs, just as he had in his African war. And so this second shelter was fitted with airtight doors and a decontamination room where chemical residues could be washed off the skin. But then Il Duce decided that even this wasn't enough. He began building another bunker several meters below the villa. Going down into it today, you feel a bit as if you're descending into a submarine. The corridors are like huge tubes, cylindrical for maximum strength. The walls stream with moisture that presses in from the damp earth. And the construction of this dank and eerie place didn't seem to put Mussolini's mind at ease.
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Ridiculous.
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Rather the opposite. There were delays in the work, and as his enemies closed in, he confided to his diary that he worried that the bunker wouldn't be finished quickly enough. And indeed, it wasn't ready. By the time Mussolini was forced from power in Rome in July 1943, he would eventually end up being shot and put on public display, hung upside down on a street in Milan. That last bunker stands now just as it did the day that work on it stopped. And looking around down there, you get a fuller sense of Mussolini's vast misadventure. In the dazzling light and space of the house and its gardens, he set out on what he thought was a path to glory and greatness. But his time at the villa would end in a desperate, futile search for safety in in the darkness deep beneath its foundations.
- [22:45]
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Alan Johnston in Rome. Now, here's one for the pub. Did you know one of Asia's most coveted beauty products is made entirely of saliva? Well, now you know, there's great demand, it seems, for the bird's nest, which a swiftlet constructs using its own spit. Get hold of one of these, eat it, and they say it'll do wonders for your complexion. Malaysia is one of the top three producers of this so called white gold. But now counterfeiters are beginning to flood the market and Jennifer Pak's been hearing their fakes could prove harmful.
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I've ingested my fair share of the jungle and forest. It's unavoidable if you grow up in a Cantonese family. My people have an adventurous palate, even by Chinese standards. Over the years I've eaten pigs brains, bear's paw, snakes, and I can tell you that they're all the same. Chewy and tasteless. These delicacies are always said to be good for you. But before tasting anything exotic, my father would always add, who knows if it's real though this skepticism is because you don't always know what goes into these foods. And in China, there have been some recent food scares too. Reused cooking oil, toxic baby milk powder. Last year, Chinese officials found high levels of nitrate in birds nests from Malaysia and effectively stopped all imports from here. Since 90% of this country's bird's nests are sent to China, the industry came to a standstill. Now the Malaysian government is pushing for more transparency in the market. That's why I was taken to a three story house in the southern state of Johor, bordering Singapore. Full of nests. These are all made by one type of bird. Swiftlets. A flock is circling above, preparing to roost. The owner, Chua Huaygun, takes me through the dark and damp building with a fluorescent light in hand. Some birds enter through small open windows. He shines it towards the ceiling. See that? He points to a corner. A white bird's nest clings to the rafter. During the breeding season, there are rows and rows of nests. Each one is made from saliva. Begins Mr. Chua. Wait. Saliva? Yes. That's why they're so valuable, he says. It takes a male and female swiftlet to produce enough spit to make a nest. The whole process can take up to three weeks to complete. A worker climbs a ladder and slides a metal spatula behind one empty nest. It loosens easily. The hardened saliva could pass for a thick white crisp. And it will soon land in someone's soup. People in China believe that eating bird's nests will improve their skin. Among other health benefits. Many are willing to pay up to 60 pounds just for a handful. It's a lucrative industry and imitators have flooded the market. Sometimes seaweed is added to the nest to increase their weight, says Mr. Thua. Or else they're made entirely out of something else, like pigskin. To boost consumer confidence, the Malaysian government has invested in a new tracking system. The birds nests are tagged with a microchip at every step. The technology is still being developed, but eventually customers will be able to use their smartphones to scan the tag and trace the nest back to the supplier. Mr. Chua was among the first to sign up. He believes the system acts like a genuine certificate from the government. And he adds, I can mark up my prices by 50%. Many of his clients from China buy by the kilo. That's tens of thousands of pounds worth. For that price, customers should have guarantees, and the technology will ensure the efforts of Mr. Chua's employees don't go to waste. At his factory in Kuala Lumpur, workers inspect each bird's nest strand by strand. They use a pair of tweezers to pluck out every feather and speck of dirt. The final products only contain saliva. Mr. Thua kindly offers me a sample already sweetened with palm sugar. He launches into a well rehearsed pitch about how it keeps skin beautiful and says he eats it too once in a while. But judging from his face full of acne and pock marks, you have to eat a lot before you see any results. Still, the bird's nest industry in Malaysia is worth £1 billion. Clearly enough, people believe in it. I smile politely and decline the offer. The running joke is that the Cantonese will eat anything with four legs on it. Any except for maybe a table. I used to agree with this, but even I have to draw the line at bird spit.
- [27:56]
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And with that, I think, wise decision from Jennifer Pack in Kuala Lumpur. We've reached the end of another edition. I'll be here again next Saturday with more from our own correspondence. I hope you'll join us then. Goodbye.