← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
April 2, 2011
00:28:06
Visiting time at Yemen's jail for political prisoners: Genevieve Bicknell meets the of...
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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, the Afghan police still a serious concern for the NATO partners trying to bring order to lawless parts of the country. A tale of torture at Yemen's political prison. As protests intensify against the rule of President Saleh. We learn how the Lost Boys have found their past, thanks to an archive which was gathering dust in Ethiopia and the traditional Indian storytellers who are managing to lure listeners away from their flat screen TVs. The role and deficiency of the police in Afghanistan is again in question. After yesterday's attack on UN personnel in the centre of Mazar e Sharif, they were unable to prevent the assault on a UN operations centre there. At least 14 people were killed. They've since made a number of arrests. The building was stormed after a protest over last month's burning at a small church in Florida of a copy of the Koran. The police are officially a vital part of the NATO led operation to quell the Taliban and restore the rule of law to troubled parts of the country. But the commitment of these officers to the cause has been questioned. There have been accusations of ill discipline, corruption and drug taking. Mark Urban, just back from Afghanistan, says the authorities have new plans to make the force more efficient.
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When the Afghan police arrived for the operation, they hardly inspired confidence. Their vehicles had been pimped in the Afghan style with machine guns, ribbons, charms and gun toting youths hung on all corners. Well, they've actually arrived on time, which is quite something for the Afghan police, said the Major. I was standing next to a British sergeant began calling out to the policeman, telling them their part in the forthcoming mission. One vehicle behind each of our vehicles, he said, and waited for the translation. The mission involved securing the flank of a combined NATO and Afghan army force that was going to sweep for insurgents if the enemy tried to escape. These Afghan police and their British partners had to stop them. I imagine the Afghans, some of whom had served in this district, had their own ideas. But they were only briefed on the operation as it started because they're not trusted. The police have long been the Cinderella service of NATO's campaign. The international community and foreign armies have tried one solution after another. And what is the outcome? In a place like Nadali, policemen only get eight weeks of basic training and the local force is currently 40% under strength. Back in late 2009, there was an ugly incident here when a rogue afghan policeman killed five British soldiers and wounded 11 at a checkpoint called Blue 25. After that, most of the local police were sacked or sent for retraining. While the performance of the Afghan army continues to improve, when the police come up, it's commonplace for British or American briefers to roll their eyes, shake their heads and talk about the challenges that remain. Those who retain their enthusiasm emphasize the need for a local solution to security. And thousands of people from the Pashtun dominated provinces of southern Afghanistan have been put through police training centres in recent months. A couple of days before the operation, I visited Blue 25, the checkpoint where things went so badly wrong between the British and one Afghan policeman. The bullet scarred buildings are abandoned, but the badges of the guards and other infantry regiments can still be seen drawn on the walls. A new checkpoint was built a short distance away. I was told British troops didn't want to stay at Blue 25 for psychological reasons. We don't know why that Afghan policeman killed his British mentors and whether his violence was an expression of tensions with them. But one thing is clear. Talking to people around Blue 25, the locals hated the police. Their commander had a feud with the village headman and his policemen beat and robbed the public regularly. The murdered British soldiers had been trying to get a grip of this situation. Standing near the new checkpoint, I struck up a conversation with Najib, a Tajik from Mazar e Sharif in the north, who'd only been there for two weeks. He hardly speaks any Pashtun, but somehow these new policemen are far more popular with the locals. Najib and his comrades are part of an organization called ancop, or Afghan National Civil Order Police. They're not locals, and that's the whole point. They're not party to village feuds, and the insurgents find it very hard to locate, let alone in intimidate, the ANKOP policemen's families. The Ankop, though, were a fashion of 18 months ago. These days, the international community is channelling guns and money towards a new acronym, the alp, or Afghan Local Police. Some small units of local police are now being formed in Nad Ali. Here, of all places, the dangers of arming local farmers ought to be obvious. Because of their bloody civil war in the 90s and the warlord armies it spawned, many Afghans are afraid of this new initiative. NATO's answer to these concerns is to place the local police under central government pay and control. It may work and it may not. But given that Afghan and British soldiers have achieved real success in damping down the insurgency in Nadali, it's worrying that new experiments and acronyms in Afghan policing are still required.
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Mark Ervin, the Yemeni capital Sana' a yesterday saw the biggest protest yet against the country's longtime ruler, President Ali Abdullah Saleh. In a parallel demonstration, tens of thousands of government supporters rallied outside the presidential palace. The president appeared and briefly addressed the crowd. He has said he won't step down until 2012 and warns of the presence already the country of Al Qaeda extremists. Genevieve Bicknell's been in Yemen talking to some of those who object to his continuing rule.
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On a side street, under the shade of a row of tall, spreading trees, a small group of men, women and children stand and watch as a soldier runs his hands through the dishes of pasta, rice and fish that the visitors have brought. He's searching for anything that shouldn't be there. It's Tuesday morning visiting hour at Yemen's political security prison in the capital, Sana'. A. The air is still. The chants of the protesters across the city in Change Square cannot be heard from here. There is nothing for Alia to do but wait. Her two young daughters scuff their shoes in the dust blown in from the desert and hold on to their mother, Zabaya, the long black robe that most women here wear. The smell of fish and spaghetti Bolognese starts to drift down the street. Alia is here to visit Walid, her husband, who was taken by security forces a year and a half ago. For three months, Alia did not know where he was. The authorities claimed to have no knowledge of his whereabouts. There was no trace of him. That was when Alia started her campaign. She made placards with Walid's photo, surrounded by quotations from Yemen's constitution. She went on marches, met other campaigners and after three months, finally got the authorities to admit that they were holding Walid. The first time she saw him in the political prison was difficult. It was hard to talk to her husband when they were separated by two wire fences with a wide gap in between. Since then, they've become used to this form of prison visiting and call across to each other, ignoring the guards who stand beside them listening to their conversation. Walid is accused of collaborating with Iran and supporting a Shia Muslim movement that is fighting an on and off war against the government in the north of Yemen. The charge is based on the fact that he had bought books from Iran to set up a Shia bookstore in the capital. And on confessions that Walid made, confessions that Alia claims were obtained by torture. As Waleed awaits trial. Alia is becoming increasingly active. Once so shy that, according to her family, you could barely hear her when she spoke, she now addresses rallies and gives press interviews. Nothing seems to intimidate her. Last year she was invited to attend a human rights conference in Beirut but was prevented from boarding the plane. Instead, she was ushered into a back office and had her passport cancelled. Being beaten by the security forces during one of the weekly protests only encouraged her further, and she says, smiling at me, her face now healed, that she'll continue her work as a human rights activist even after Walid is released. I've never been stronger, she remarks. This unyielding, dedicated resistance is probably not what President Ali Abdullah Saleh had intended to inspire. Yet it is being replicated in the streets and squares all over Yemen as protesters demand an end to his 32 years of rule. As Walid's sister Moada, puts it all my life I knew that President Saleh was bad, but I knew not to say anything. But now, after Walid's arrest, we've started being more open and saying what we think. Over the last few weeks, Yemenis from all walks of life have started to speak without fearing, and most are telling President Saleh to go. And however he tries to quell these protests with tear gas, with paid thugs brandishing sticks and knives, and with snipers firing from rooftops, he only succeeds in increasing the number of protesters. Oppression, he is discovering, can be counterproductive. Outside the prison, the shadows cast by the trees shrink as the sun moves overhead. The midday call to prayer begins echoing across the city, one call melding into another until they become one rolling wave of sound. The soldier eventually finishes inspecting the dishes of food brought by Alia and her daughters. It's been a long wait, but finally they are allowed into the prison to visit Walid. But how long will the people of Yemen have to wait to see if President Saleh heeds their cause for change?
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Genevieve Bicknell In Sana' a it's been almost 20 years since the world first heard the story of the Lost Boys of Sudan. They were the youngsters, thousands of them, who fled the civil war there and sought refuge in camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. Tales of their harrowing journeys on foot have been documented in print and on film. But Paul Adams tells us that a remarkable online archive is now helping these Lost Boys, who are scattered across the world, to rediscover their past and, in some cases, their friends and family, too.
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The boys are young, but their faces are old, staring out across the years their simple black and white photographs, reminders of traumas no young person should ever have to endure. But the fact that the snapshots exist at all is something of a miracle. A miracle being put to very good use by a website run from a nondescript building opposite a car lot in Arizona. The story of the Lost Boys is a harrowing, epic tale of sudden flight from peaceful villages attacked during Sudan's long civil war. Of boys, some as young as five, walking hand in hand through the bush for months at a time, of walking at night and hearing friends dragged off into the dark by ravenous lions. Of long years spent growing up in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, a set of circumstances so bleak it's extraordinary to think that anyone survived, let alone thrived. Somewhere along the line, aid workers had the foresight to interview the boys, compiling a record of their background, their family members and traveling companions. Thousands and thousands of eight page handwritten documents, most with a single photograph attached. The boys look haunted, and sometimes the records hint at just how traumatized many of them were. One boy is described as despondent, and the field worker notes simply, I did my best to console him. As wars ebbed and flowed and refugees moved this way and that, the records were quietly forgotten and gathered dust in a warehouse in Ethiopia until a few years ago, when an anthropologist happened upon them, realized their worth and arranged for more than 100,000 pages of notes to be scanned and sent to the Arizona Lost Boys center, by now a refuge for more than 600 young men who came to the US as part of a resettlement program. For the most part, the former Lost Boys were flourishing, studying, getting degrees and jobs. Not bad, considering many of them had never seen toilets, light switches or refrigerators before they got here, let alone taps that dispense water without even being touched. There was so much to get used to. Kuala Waan, director of the center in Phoenix, said he'd never seen fat people before. When he and his friends entered the busy terminal at New York's JFK airport, they wondered who all these people were and why they were rushing about. As for the salad they were given on the plane, well, that was just grass, what Kuol and his friends used to feed the cows back home. Ten years after his arrival, it all makes him laugh. Along with 13,000 other Lost Boys, he now owns a document that links him powerfully with his past. He's especially proud of the picture, which shows a little boy with one eye slightly bruised from a football accident in the camp in Ethiopia. It's the only image he has of his youth. But the document is a bittersweet affair. It's helped him to locate some of those he traveled with. But it also contains the names of a father who died years after Kuol fled the village, a brother who fought and died in the war and whose body was never recovered, and a sister killed by lightning. Of course, lots of boys never made it either. The center is trying hard to make sure that documents find their way back to Sudan to to families who may have been wondering for years what happened to their sons. Some will now learn that their boys did at least make it some of the way. Who their companions were and perhaps where they died. The website has been a spectacular success. Even before it went live, lost boys from around the world were all over it, looking up their friends, filling in the blanks in stories half remembered, holding for the first time documents linking them to their stolen childhood. Even though they've grown accustomed to their nickname and wear it like a badge of honour, the records make them feel a little less lost.
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Paul Adams in Arizona. An announcement's due within months, which could change lives forever in the Amazon region of Ecuador. The government in Quito is to rule on whether oil exploration in the region can be extended. Already oil here is one of the country's most valuable natural resources, but exploiting it has proved controversial and sometimes damaging to the environment. Linda Presley's travelled deep into the rainforest to meet one of the groups of indigenous people who are campaigning against further exploration.
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Kemper is in his hut, swinging gently in his hammock. The smell of smoke from a gone out fire hangs in the air and tiny intense shafts of tropical light beam through the palm leaf walls, reflecting his face and the colour beads around his neck. With his even features, bright eyes and perfect teeth, I think maybe Kemper is one of the best looking people I've ever met. Kemper is the 89 year old shaman of the Wurani people, the conduit of the jaguar spirit. He says the jaguar walks the entire territory, but that the spirit is troubled. There's pressure on Waorani land from oil companies and the jaguar is warning of great conflict, death even. It's oil exploration that's defined and threatened the very existence of the Wurani over the last 50 years. And it's the reason why they began to have contact with outsiders. I asked Kempere if he remembers the first people he encountered who were not Wurani. It was in the 1950s or 60s, he says. That day he and his friends were in the forest hunting monkeys. One of them spotted a new trail. Definitely Not a Wurani trail. They followed it. There were three men camped in a clearing. One was sleeping, but that man would never wake up. Kempere's friends killed all three workers for an oil company. This was how the Wurundni defended their territory against invaders. Soon after Kemperi's bloody encounter with the oil men, a plane flew over. It was the first he'd ever seen. It buzzed around for three consecutive days and on the fourth day it flew low over their huts. Someone on a megaphone shouted down in Wurrunni, live good lives, do not kill. Kempri only learned much later. These were missionaries authorised by Ecuador's government to move the Huarani away from their oil rich territory. By the 1970s, many had been relocated. Others died in epidemics. We were invited to Bameno to experience Warani culture and hear the people's concerns in the face of further oil exploration. We too arrived by small plane, a sometimes terrifying journey through thick cloud. With visibility at nil, I console myself with the thought that the pilot has on a nicely pressed shirt, so he obviously hasn't come to work to die. Approaching Bamena, we dip below the clouds and the rainforest is there in all its lush green glory. Then we're bumping along a grassy airstrip. As we tumble clumsily out of the plane, together with a ton of TV equipment, rubber boots, supplies and a bag of croissants, we're swept up in an orgy of handshaking and name exchanging. The people who greet us are more or less naked, their faces and torsos painted elaborately with black and red dye. The women are adorned with beads and palm fronds. Each of the men carries a blowpipe and wears a string tied round his waist that he tucks the end of his penis into and from its perch on a muscly brown forearm. A great beast of a blue and gold macaw watches us quizzically. There's a brief interlude where we munch on croissants. I spot that fearsome macaw looking a bit too interested and stuff mine all in my mouth very fast. The children are delighted when, moments later, the macaw dive bombs from a rafter and snatches the producer's croissant right out of his hand, drawing blood in the process. The afternoon's a bit calmer as we travel by motorised canoe deeper into the forest. We're taken to a giant kapok tree. It's home to a harpy eagle and revered by the people of Bameno. They sit against it, chatting and laughing. The young men hugging its roots. Penti says as long as this tree survives, so too will the huarani. His wife, Debotto, clearly loves this place, too. But there's anxiety. She tells me later she can't grow food close to the river because of the oil contamination that comes downstream. The decision on Ecuador's future oil development will be made by next year. Meanwhile, in this tropical paradise, the jaguar spirit stalks the forest, watching, waiting and warning.
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Linda Presley. And there'll be more about her visit to Ecuador in Crossing Continents next Thursday morning here on Radio 4. India is one of the world's greatest storytelling nations. It's where many of humanity's best loved legends and folktales originated. There are Buddhist Jataka stories and the Pancha Tantra, the ancient Sanskrit collection of animal fables in verse and prose. The tradition continues to this day with novels and Bollywood screenplays enjoyed by millions. Meanwhile, one of India's unique and widely travelled storytelling traditions, lost for nearly a century, is being rediscovered, as Anu Anand has been finding out.
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When I was four, I lived with my grandparents in India for six months. Once a week, my grandmother would oil my hair as we sat on a string cot in the sun. I hated the ritual because she would then braid my hair so tightly my scalp burned. But I was compensated by her stories. Some delightfully recounted monkeys stealing bread and even babies from people's courtyards. Others spoke of battles between underwater snakes and blue skinned gods. And occasionally there was history. She would tell me about her escape in 1947 from the newly created nation of Pakistan. Of course, she never mentioned that nearly a million people were slaughtered in a frenzy of communal violence. Her version sounded rather like a cross country holiday, albeit by bullock cart. A few weeks ago, I was transported back to that string cot when I chanced upon a nighttime storytelling session here in Delhi. I'd wandered down a twisting lane in one of the city's oldest Muslim neighborhoods. Beggars lined the well trodden path, pleading for coins from the hundreds who pressed by. The aroma of kebabs rose from coal fired tandoors. There were tiny shops selling incense, altar cloths and calligraphy. I turned and suddenly found myself in a quiet, open courtyard. People huddled around coal braziers, the red glow illuminating faces young, old, wealthy and poor. Up front, on a stage by a floodlit marble tomb, sat two men dressed entirely in white. They were storytellers, like the raconteurs of the old bazaars, and they were relating a fant tale about an army trying to conquer an enchanted land called Hoshruba the army was assisted by a trickster armed with a cloak of invisibility as well as a magic pouch whose tiny space enclosed parallel worlds. I found myself transfixed. It wasn't just the story. The storytellers were speaking a beautiful language lost to most Indians today. Urdu once flowered in Delhi when Central Asian conquerors swept into India 500 years ago. Persian, Arabic and Turkic idiom tangled with the native tongue. The result was a language so ornate and feisty, it inspired Indian poetry, music and theatre for centuries to come. The story of Hoshraba comes from the Dastan of amir Hamza, an 8th century epic that occupies 46 volumes. Teeming with planets, sorcerers, ogres and disarmingly clever women, these tales travelled orally via professional storytellers across the subcontinent for more than 400 years. The men I was watching, Mahmoud Farooqi and Danish Hussain, have reinterpreted this Urdu canon for today's listeners. They seek to draw people away from their flat screen TVs and gaming devices back to their own limitless imaginations. Even more extraordinary, they are reviving the storyteller's role as oral historians. As the tale of Hoshraba drew to a close, they began to recount some of the most painful stories from India's recent past. From Partition, we heard of children who escaped slaughter by hiding in train carriages filled with corpses of women who married their rapists. I have never seen a gathering of normally boisterous Indians, so still some were in tears. The final story is etched in my mind. Ghulam Ali Limfetter was a subaltern officer in the British Indian Army. He'd been trained, as his name suggests, to fit artificial limbs on wounded soldiers. In 1947, all military personnel were asked to choose which country they would serve India or Pakistan. Ghlam Ali chose India. Pakistan branded him a traitor. But India too denied the Muslim soldier citizenship. In letters to officials across the globe, Ghulam Ali pleaded his case. He was a limb fitter, the best. Surely he was needed, regardless of his religion. Finally, in 1957, he was dumped in a Hindu camp in Lahore, the last refuge for a man whose own identity had become as dismembered as the ghost limbs he was trained to replace. His file, found decades later, states his name, date of birth and occupation. Under nationality it says simply unknown. As I left the courtyard, I was reminded how little I know of my own family's history. In our rush towards the future, the storyteller's quest is to remind us, to make time, to listen as well as to pass on our heritage, our stories, with or without the head full of oil.
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Anu Anand in Delhi. Finally, you do have to take care of yourself when posted to a new city. Even a correspondent knows someone may try to take you for a ride. This story from Owen Bennett Jones, newly arrived in Cairo.
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Given the choice, I prefer to walk. More instructive. And healthier too, I guess. But in Cairo the other day, I was so thoroughly lost, only a taxi could get me to my hotel. Ali, his pot belly rubbing on the steering wheel, introduced himself with a beaming smile. And so began a fairly typical exchange. Alexandria, the Pyramids. I can take you anywhere. I work all day and night. I have four children. Thank you, Ali. Not today, but maybe another time. Where are you from? He said. Wales. I'm from Wales. Australia? No, Wales. It's near England. Ireland? No, Wales. It's a colony of England. At last, a flash of understanding, a sympathetic nod. Very good, Very good. I have two cars. If we go to Alexandria, we'll take the other one. It's got a sunroof. We fell into a silence. And then as we got near the hotel, there was a boy ahead, his face smeared with dirt, walking in the middle of the road with a few bedraggled bunches of flowers in his arm. With the car all but stationary in a queue, Ali haggled through the window as the boy walked to keep pace with us. And eventually he bought a bunch. So, Ali, who are they for? My wife. She's in hospital. Oh, dear. No, no, she's given birth. When? Today. Today? Just three hours ago, he said. Why aren't you with her? I'm going to her now. Well, congratulations. It's twins. Twins? Yes, he said, shaking his head with a rueful smile. Twins. Double congratulations. We were near the hotel now, and as I sorted out my money, I doubled the tip. Good luck with the twins, Ali. Thank you. Thank you. And then I saw the flowers. They lay strewn on the floor by the gear stick, even more battered than when he'd bought them. It's the thought that counts. I know. But clearly he couldn't give them to his wife like that. And I just wondered, gift or prop? I gave him a knowing smile. He returned it in full measure. And as he drew away, putting the money in his pocket, he gave me just the faintest of winks.
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Owen Renner Jones and Cairo. A bit wiser and only a little poorer.
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That's it.
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More next weekend. Do join us. Goodbye.