← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
April 09, 2011
00:27:55
'Even the winners are losers'-- Andrew Harding goes on a road journey through Ivory on...
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Hello there.
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You're about to hear Radio 4's from our own correspondent. It's a download from the BBC and it's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today, a road journey through a shattered and frightened Ivory Coast. An Afghan woman who lost nine of her babies becomes a midwife. There's a one week dash to build a home for an American marine seriously injured in Iraq. And we hear how a four yard long sturgeon changed the life of a Danube fisherman forever. The crisis in Ivory coast continues unresolved this morning with the man few people think should be President Laurent Gbagbo, still holding out in his bunker in the port city of Abidjan. Close by are hundreds of troops loyal to the man who most believe won the presidential election, Al Asan Watara. Fighting between their supporters has spread throughout the country and has been going on for weeks. Both sides now stand accused of serious human rights abuses. Andrew Harding's been finding out how the violence has left huge numbers of casualties, as well as towns and villages destroyed and many people displaced.
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Monsieur Goguebaud pours himself another generous early morning glug of French table wine and sits back in his chair to listen to the distant boom of explosions in Abidjan. Power corrupts, he says pensively. As if on cue, 10 men with guns push through the front gates and demand the keys to our car. We plead and protest, and to our surprise, they relent and leave empty handed. We've been staying at Mr. Gogbo's dilapidated Auberge on the edge of the city for a few days now. His wife and children are trapped by the fighting, but he says they're fine. And besides, his girlfriend is here to look after the cooking. Mr. Gogbo is a retired petrol station manager. He seems to spend his days surrounded by chickens at a table in the yard, drinking with workers from the nearby quarry. The quarry is closed. Like most things in Ivory coast right now, the inn sits next to a grand four lane highway, but hours can pass without a single car driving by. You get a glimpse of how impressive this country once was and how far it's fallen. We drove here across the northern border from Mali, 29 hours in all. A flat tyre, a broken radiator, a wheel falling off every 80 odd roadblocks, and a terrified driver who abandoned us in the middle of the night. Halfway through the country, the official capital, Yamasukra, leaps improbably out of the lush countryside. The city has avenues the size of runways, monumental architecture a la Pyongyang and a record breaking basilica bigger than St. Peter's in Rome. Perhaps you'd care for a drink. Augustin Thiam is preparing to host a small lunch party in the marquee on his lawn. It's days since the capital was captured without a fight by the forces of the elected president, Alassin Ouattara. Thank God, says Mr. Thiam, a suave tribal leader. He has no time for the former president, Laurent Gbagbo. A bad example for Africa, he tuts, and a bad example for the world. We're in a rush and drive on, making a detour west. The traffic, the tall undergrowth, chews at the crumbling tarmac. From both sides, the roadblocks become more frequent and more uncomfortable. We pass through empty, burned out villages. There are prisoners, one crouched in a petrol station forecourt, looking terrified. Another group is being held at gunpoint in some bushes by the roadside. We decide not to stop. The soldiers here are a mixed bunch, some well trained and in regular uniforms, others in rags, clutching old hunting rifles and demanding cash. There's been a massacre in the town of Dwekwe. Several hundred dead, maybe as many as a thousand. The numbers and the blame are being bitterly questioned on all sides. But a familiar equation is at work here. Communal tensions plus inflammatory rhetoric plus undisciplined militia groups equals trouble. A United nations soldier from Morocco is guarding some volunteers as they hunt for bodies. They've been at it for five days. I ask how many dead children so far? He holds up four fingers, then sobs heavily into his face mask. The road on towards Abidjon turns into a highway and the roadblocks disappear, but so do the cars and the people. It is too quiet. I start to miss being waved down by men with guns. We pass Monsieur Gogbo's auberge and a few minutes later arrive on the edge of the city. A year ago, I came to Abidjan ahead of the World cup to make a film about Ivory Coast's remarkable track record of producing football stars. People were a little nervous about the upcoming presidential election, but most seemed to think it would solve more problems than it created. Instead, a year on, I'm driving into a ghost town. We pass under a bridge and the smell of corpses wafts through the car. GUNFIRE RATTLES Somewhere off to the right. We stop at a petrol station that's been turned into a military camp. Soldiers collapsed in the shade. Lots of dented cars, probably confiscated like ours nearly was. There's a dead body wedged awkwardly in the back of one of them. And in the car wash, well over a Hundred prisoners sit and sweat in the midday heat, all young men seized quite probably at random by troops anxious to crack down on the militia groups that are still causing havoc across the city. The conflict here is winding down, but slowly. Laurent Gbagbo chose with staggering self regard to make his final stand in the most heavily populated corner of the country. So it looks like you've won, I say to a colonel sitting in the garage next to the unleaded petrol pumps. He frowns. I know war, he says. Even the winners are losers.
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And that's Andrew Harding. In the United states, more than 1,600 soldiers have now lost limbs after being caught up in explosions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the past, many of them would have died from their injuries, but today, thanks to new armoured clothing and improved medical care, many live on, requiring expensive medical care and rehabilitation. The injured, of course, have extremely specialized housing needs and in some cases the these are now being met thanks to the efforts of an American charity. Robert Hodion has been finding out more about these so called homes for our troops.
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By any reasonable estimation, US Marine Sergeant Kenny Lyon should be dead. His buddies tell him that the mortar landed just nine feet behind him on that day in 2006 in Iraq. And even if he didn't die, and the doctors told his family that he would, even if he didn't die, his head injury was so severe a 3 inch diameter chunk of his forehead was blown away. Even if he didn't die, at best he'd have no personality. Kenny didn't die. He did lose his left leg above the knee, and except for parts of his right leg, there's not a place on his body that you can't find gruesome scars. But his personality is intact. He's a relentlessly upbeat guy of 25 who knows well that while his life is difficult, it's better than being dead. But his life is difficult. Two years after being blown up, Kenny and a Marine buddy, Stephen Kiernan, who lost both of his legs, decided they needed to get out of military housing into a real apartment. Problem is, there aren't many apartments suitable for two guys who only have one leg between them. Before we talk about the apartment the two guys found, let me tell you something about artificial legs. They are uncomfortable. Kenny says walking and standing on his leg is like sitting on an unpadded bicycle seat that's set too high. If he wears his leg too much, walks too far, he works up blisters on his stump and is stuck in his wheelchair until the blisters heal. Coming home after being Out, Kenny takes off his leg with the same relief you'd feel taking off a pair of shoes that are too tight. But as I said, that puts him in his wheelchair. And that brings me back to the apartment he and Steven found. Like all standard housing, the place they moved into in Virginia had doors too narrow for wheelchairs. The shower was the biggest nightmare. No safety grab bars. And even these macho warriors were scared they'd fall and knock themselves out. Which brings me to Dawn Settle. Dawn works for a Virginia company that builds homes and Atlantic Builders. Last summer, she read an article about Homes for Our Troops, a charity that builds handicapped accessible homes for disabled veterans at no cost to the veteran. Dawn went to her bosses and told them they should build one of those homes. By all accounts, she was crying at the time. Dawn cries easily. Before the recession, Dawn's company was putting up 250 new homes a year. Last year, 50. So you'd think her bosses might have been reluctant. But they weren't. And last summer, they built a home for Kenny's buddy Steven. They got carpenters and plumbers and electricians and all the other tradesmen they needed to donate the skilled labor. The cement and wood and pipe and even the sod for the lawn were donated. It's a nice home. Four bedrooms, two baths, 2,600 square feet. It would cost you $400,000 to build a home like that. The team built Stephen's home in 31 days, which was a Homes for Our Troops record. But records, as they say, are meant to be broken. And some builder in Atlanta built one in 26 days. The men and women at Dawn's company had found the experience of building Stephen's home deeply gratifying. They felt good about themselves, which is tough when business is as rotten as it has been. So they signed up to build two more. As it happens, one of those would be the 100th that homes for Our Troops has built. It would be for Kenny. And remember that 26 day record? The team was determined to beat it, shatter it, actually. Publicly. They said they'd finish Kenny's home in a week. They started last Friday on a rainy, blustery morning. Several hundred volunteers worked alongside the skilled professionals. There was donated food and drink. It had the festive community air of a 19th century barn raising. The various teams worked 24 hours a day and Monday afternoon, 76 hours, 21 minutes after the first wall was raised, the house was finished. Dawn cried. For those of us who remember the Vietnam War, this particular community event was especially poignant. Americans weren't building homes for disabled Vietnam vets. At best, they ignored them. Many Americans who hated the Vietnam War found it easy to hate the veterans. I hesitate to call this progress, but Americans have learned that it's possible to hate the Iraq and Afghanistan wars but love the troops. It is common to see Americans in airports burst into spontaneous applause at the sight of a group of service members in uniform. Much I must add to the acute embarrassment of the troops themselves. But here's the sad part of this story. Homes for Our Troops has a new slogan and a new goal.
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100 more Robert Hodiern Australia is now the world's number one exporter of iron ore, and it's largely because of China's insatiable appetite for the mineral. The trade is now worth tens of billions of pounds a year and has created a whole new breed of Aussie mining magnates. But with the market price of iron ore rising dramatically, the Chinese are no longer prepared to rely on Australian companies to support their needs. Stephen Sacher's been learning how. They're developing their own mine in the heart of the Australian outback.
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Kew, in Western Australia boasts a population of 273 humans, that is. It's home to a rather larger community of frogs, as I discovered on landing at Kew's dirt airstrip. After two hours in the cramped cabin of a chartered prop plane, I needed to find what Aussies call a dunny. My pilot pointed to a small wooden shed. You'll be right in there, mate, he said. In I went, only to meet a determined looking woman in Wellington boots. Hold on just a second, she said. She squirted a jet of bleach into the dilapidated commode. A small brown frog leaped out. She trod on it. Another emerged. And another. They were despatched without mercy. I peered into the bowl. I saw a writhing mass of amphibians coming, covered in bubbling disinfectant. My companion yanked on the flush and turned to me, triumphant. There you go, she said. All yours. In Kew, they have little use for sentiment. It's 400 miles inland from Perth, and its glory days came and went long ago. In the 1890s, it was a gold rush town, home to 10,000 prospectors with glittering dreams. An American mining engineer by the name of Herbert Hoover was once president of the local shire. He went on to be president of the United States. When Hoover and the other gold miners moved on, Kew receded into rural oblivion. The only reminder of the glory days? A trail of slag heaps on the edge of town but now Australia is in the grip of another mining boom. Foreigners are heading into the bush to extract Western Australia's mineral riches. The this time much of the money and ambition is coming from China. It's not gold the Chinese are after, but iron ore. Australia has become China's quarry of choice. An hour's drive west of town is the exploration camp of Sinosteel Midwest, a mining conglomerate wholly owned by the Chinese state. Air conditioned cabins and workshops built in kit form in a Chinese factory have been shipped into the outback and and assembled with painstaking care. Everybody here has power showers, satellite TV and yes frog free toilets. The camp is home to geologists, mining engineers and labourers sampling and mapping the iron ore deposits in a ridge of hills known as the Weld Range. Sinosteel expects to dig out 300 million tons of iron ore over the next 20 years. The state government of Western Australia is planning a new rail line and a port on the Indian Ocean to ensure that Sinosteel's voracious Chinese steel mills receive a constant flow of Weld Range ore. But the earthmovers and the monster trucks can't move in just yet because Sinosteel needs the agreement of the Aboriginal peoples whose history and culture is tied to this land. Close to the Sinosteel camp I met Colin Hamlet, an elder of the Wujiri Yammaji tribe who is in the forefront of the campaign to safeguard his ancestors sacred sites. This land tells the story of my people, he told me. Our songlines, our camps, our relics, they are all here. Colin is in his 70s. His long beard is grey and he's got a smoker's cough. But his determination to exercise his native land rights has has forced significant concessions from Sino Steel. In particular, the company has promised to conserve Wiljie Mia, an unremarkable hill with a gash close to its summit. Colin took me there as the setting sun burnished the rock orange and red. We've been mining here for thousands of years, Colin told me. For the ochre, for our cave paintings. And this is where we got it from. And there we were at the rim, looking into a cavity more than 100ft deep. A mine of sorts. Maybe the oldest mine in the world. 10,000 years before Sino Steel, native Australians were digging holes in search of riches. Before I left the Weld Range, Colin and his family invited me to their bush camp. No air conditioning here but an open stove, plenty of shade and a steaming pot of Kangaroo Stewart. Colin knows there'll be no stopping the earth movers leveling some of his beloved hills. There's too much money at stake in Beijing, in Perth, and not least in Aboriginal communities, which will get jobs and cash. In the short term, everybody wins. China will suck up the iron ore. Australia will pocket a tidy profit. And in the long term, well, that's a story yet to be written in
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the Ancient Rock, Stephen Sacher. And you can see the films he's been making in Australia on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday on the BBC News Channel. A new initiative is underway in Afghanistan to try to make giving birth a much safer business than it is at present. Right now, there are few places in the world where it's more dangerous to have a child. An Afghan woman faces a 1 in 11 risk of dying from complications during pregnancy and childbirth. 1 in 5 children dies during or shortly after birth or before the age of five. Nadine Ghori, who's just back from Kabul, says the training and deployment of local midwives is at the heart of this campaign.
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Rogel wraps a grimy blue scarf around her face and uses the cleanest corner of it to wipe away her tears. She's just told me how nine of her babies died after she gave birth to them at home. Her firstborn, a little boy, was premature. Her mother asked a village mullah for advice. He suggested prayer and a type of holy water. The baby died. Her second child died from an infection a few hours after birth. And so it went on. Nine dead babies in total. I'm sitting in an Afghan neonatal clinic in Goldara district, just 20 minutes drive from the capital city, Kabul. Women, some in traditional blue burqas, others wearing the brightly coloured scarves and loose pantaloons more typical of the Kushi gypsy tribe, are here. Some are clutching roundly pregnant bellies. Others are here to have their babies vaccinated. Few would be here at all if they hadn't been persuaded to come by a local midwife. A young girl called Pashtu, with a dirty face and scared eyes, agrees to talk. She doesn't know how old she is, but she looks no more than 15. She's eight months pregnant with her second child. Next month she'll give birth in the safety of the clinic. She gave birth to her first child in a filthy hole in the ground toilet at home, with only her elderly mother in law for help. Her son was born blue and barely breathing. He survived for just under an hour. I ask her why the baby died. She gives me a nonchalant shrug. Her aunt, a large woman with long braided dark hair, is sitting next to her. Pashtu is too skinny and doesn't eat enough, she asserts loudly. This is why her child died. Another woman tells me it's because Pashtu's husband is an opium addict. Many babies in Afghanistan also die because of traditional cultural practices. It's common for babies to be washed in freezing cold water immediately after birth, which can cause pneumonia. Umbilical cords are often cut with unsterile knives, or babies are placed on a dirty floor to ward off evil spirits. And few women breastfeed for the first few days because colostrum, the nutritious fluid in early breast milk, something which is vital for a baby's immune system, is seen here as dirty. Instead, newborns are often fed melted butter. Istaklal Hospital in central Kabul houses the city's largest maternity ward. Here, stories of ignorance prevail. Two teenage girls giggle as they tell me they had no idea how pregnancies happened, even after they were married. One of them is here because she's miscarried at five months, but she hadn't known she was pregnant because she wasn't aware of any of the symptoms of pregnancy. If we ask questions about these things, we will be called bad girls, they explain as their faces flush red with embarrassment. But change is beginning to happen. The Ministry of Public Health has launched an immediate programme to train and deploy 400 new midwives a year. What is key is that the women are not outsiders forced on a mistrustful local population, but are local women from the communities they serve. This means religious leaders and conservative husbands don't prevent them from working. Largely as a result of this, the number of women giving birth who were helped by trained midwives has more than tripled since 2003. Roghel, who learned the hard way just what giving birth alone can mean, has now been given midwifery training by the British charity Save the Children. This woman, who lost nine of her own babies, has now saved the lives of many others. She tells me how the week before, she had locked an angry mother in law out of a room where a young woman gave birth because the mother in law had TB and could have passed the infection to the newborn. She chuckles with glee as she recounts the tale of the mother in law banging on the door trying to get in. It's clear what Rogel, with a combination of personal tragedy and a solid new education, can achieve in her community. But as yet, there are not enough Rogels to go around, and for her, the story has a happy ending. After her training, she realized why her first nine babies had died when she fell pregnant again. She knew what to do and now has a healthy son and two daughters. They are living proof of my work, she says with a big smile.
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And that was Nadine Ghori in Afghanistan. For millions of years, the sturgeon has been cruising the cool depths of the River Danube. But now it seems this ancient species, prized for its black caviar eggs, is dying out so fast that scientists have felt the need to hold a meeting about it. They duly gathered the other day in the town of Tulcea on the Danube delta in Romania. Nick Thorpe joined them, but not before travelling down the river and hearing story after story about this mighty fish.
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The beauty of the sturgeon, explains Radu Suchu, is that this is an armoured fish. He takes down from his shelf his visitor's box, which rattles Inside are a mixture not of fish bones, the thin things which get stuck in your throat and you have to eat bread to dislodge, but chunks of sturgeon skeletons. The complete one looks like a fossil. With its distinctive long, sharp nose, the sturgeon has been around for a lot longer than humans, at least 200 million years. It's such a perfect design, hardly changed, the sturgeon continues. Radu is not a good swimmer, but it is a good climber. And he fishes out two long yellow pectoral bones which the fish uses to anchor itself on the bed of fast flowing rivers like the Danube, which it goes up every few years to spawn at the famous underwater cataracts at the Iron Gates between Romania and Serbia. The river climbs steeply. Navigation for ships in medieval times was impossible, but migrating sturgeon used to anchor themselves behind rocks to rest, then swam and anchored, swam and anchored, slowly climbing their own stairway to heaven, hundreds of miles upstream in the spawning grounds of the Szigetkas region in Hungary. Before that is, the Iron Gates hydroelectric dam blocked their path. Then the Gabcikovo dam in Slovakia, then caused the sighetkurs to dry out. A combination of dams, pollution and overfishing have driven this most ancient of fish to the brink of extinction. Radu tells the tale of a poor Danube fisherman in Nearby Izakchea in 1999, who caught an 800 pound female, nearly four yards long, with 180 pounds of black caviar inside. A pound in weight currently sells for 2,800 pounds sterling. The top price in New York last year was 4200. The fish changed his life, but it was a disaster for sturgeon stocks because there are so few mature female beluga sturgeon left. The most valuable variety for caviar. Since 2006, Romania has banned sturgeon fishing both in the Danube and in the Black Sea, their usual habitat. In February, Bulgaria did the same, and there are similar promises from Serbia and Ukraine. From 2009, Romanian and Norwegian scientists have collaborated in a special project to find out more about sturgeon. Satellite transmitters were attached to five adult fish in the river, which were then released and headed back out to sea. The transmitters only send their information to the satellite when the fish surface, which is extremely rare. One of them, a 12 year old male, they named Harald after the King of Norway. He headed down to the Turkish coast of the Black Sea for a while. Who can blame him? Then up to the northern shore, to a shallow ledge off the Crimean Peninsula, where the water is not so cold for the winter. Then disaster struck. 300 days after he was released, the satellite image showed him moving slowly for several hours, perhaps in a rowing boat. Harold had been caught. Then the satellite shows him moving inland at a steady pace for six days, probably on a train. Then he disappears. One wonders what the person who bought him thought of the transmitter. Perhaps he swallowed it. The Danube abounds with sturgeon tales. Nikita, a 70 year old fisherman I met at Gundarest, nearly 200 miles up the river, told me how a big sturgeon he caught in the 1980s hit his rowing boat so hard with its tail, it knocked his fishing companion into the water. I had to decide which of them to save, the fish or my friend. HE LAUGHS eventually, after several hours thrashing around in the water, he got them both into the boat and we sang all the way back to the harbour. He told me, would he sing me that song? We cannot sing during Lent. He exclaimed. Like nearly everyone in Gundarest, Nikita is a Russian, an old believer whose ancestors took refuge here from religious reforms in Russia centuries ago. Did the fish make him rich? We had to sell it to the fishing cooperative for peanuts, he laments, then adds, in my house, money is like the Danube. It rises one day and goes down the next. In a restaurant in Sulina, where the river flows out into the Black Sea, I order grilled sturgeon. It tastes delicious, like wild salmon. But catching sturgeon is banned, they say they buy it in the supermarket, Radu explains, But in a fishing community, that's a little hard to believe.
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And with that fishy tale from Nick Thorpe, we've reached the end of another edition. There'll be more from our own correspondence next Saturday at half past eleven, so please join us then. Goodbye.