← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
April 23, 2011
00:28:01
Students aren't revolting in Qatar and Oman -- Robin Lustig's been to the Gulf states...
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Robin Lustig
This is BBC Radio with a download
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Stuart Hughes
of from our own correspondent. Here to introduce the program is Kate Ady.
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Kate Adie
If you have everything you want, there's nothing to protest about. Is that why people in Qatar and Oman haven't joined the uprisings in the Arab world? Also today, the family, which Colonel Gaddafi failed to erase from Libyan history. We talked to the young women charged with taking health care into the Ethiopian countryside. And on a commuter train in Paris, hear the one name the British can never pronounce. But first, the death of the British journalist Tim Hetherington this week has reopened the discussion about the dangers of reporting wars. Hetherington, who'd made a film about Afghanistan, which was nominated for an Oscar, was among a group of Western journalists caught up in a mortar explosion in Libya. Some 60 journalists were killed worldwide last year, but in fact, most were victims of their own governments and weren't actually reporting conflict. And statistics fail to acknowledge that there are many more people working in news now than there used to be. An exhibition about war reporting is due to open soon at the Imperial War Museum north in Manchester. One of the exhibits was donated by my BBC colleague Stuart Hughes, who was himself injured in an explosion in April 2003.
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Stuart Hughes
I was on assignment for the BBC in northern Iraq. One bright spring morning, my team travelled to a former frontline position in the town of Kifri. A few days earlier, it had been bombed by American planes, forcing Saddam Hussein's troops to abandon their trenches and flee. The mortar attacks on the town during previous days had subsided and a young Peshmerga soldier traveling with us assured us the area was safe. He was wrong. Just seconds after stepping out of our vehicle, I triggered a landmine hidden beneath the grass. It blew off my right heel. Hearing the explosion, our cameraman, Kaveh Golistan, instinctively thought we were coming under mortar fire. He tried to run for safety. Instead, he set off more landmines and was killed instantly. Dazed but still conscious, I looked down and saw that the back of my foot was a mass of blood and exposed bone, the skin around it blown apart into what looked like misshapen lumps of modeling clay. I received emergency treatment and was flown back to the uk. Five days after stepping on the landmine, my right leg was amputated below the knee. Shortly afterwards, I began the long process of rehabilitation. Learning to walk again was frustratingly slow. The pace was dictated by the speed at which my wounds healed and the swelling eased around what remained of my leg, which I nicknamed Mr. Stumpy. After three months, I was fitted with my first prosthetic leg. It felt alien and unwieldy, a clumsy appendage compared to real skin and bone. Even so, being able to stand upright with two shoes poking out from my trouser legs instead of one felt like massive progress. Six months after the explosion, I was well enough to return to my job as a BBC producer. Wherever I went, my artificial leg came with me from the streets of Damascus, Beirut and Jerusalem to the British military base in Basra. Whenever I pass through an airport scanner, the metal in my prosthesis sets off the security alarms. So as a preemptive measure, I learned the phrase, I have an artificial leg in a variety of languages. But a few years ago, after countless assignments and many thousands of road miles, the time finally came to retire my trusty prosthesis. It was battered, worn and showing its age, not unlike its owner. I was fitted with a new leg. An Old Faithful was consigned to the back of the wardrobe like a child's toy that has fallen out of favor. But it's about to enjoy a new lease of life. A few days ago, as I marked the eighth anniversary of my amputation, the old leg was packed in bubble wrap and cardboard and sent to the Imperial War Museum in Manchester. It'll be in illustrious company. It will stand alongside other relics donated by correspondents from down the ages. The burqa John Simpson wore when he secretly entered Afghanistan, one of Martin Bell's trademark white suits, and a typewriter used by Michael Nicholson in Vietnam. It's strange to think a part of me will soon be on display naked for all to see, although I can't claim mine will be the first prosthesis the to become a visitor's attraction. A replica of an artificial leg dating from 300 BC is on show at the Science Museum. A prosthetic arm worn by the cameraman Mohamin, who lost his limb when an ammunition dump exploded in Ethiopia, is kept in a case at the Frontline Club, the watering hole for the foreign press corps in London. I raise a glass to it every time I'm there. Recent days have served as a tragic reminder that journalism can be a perilous profession. On Wednesday, the photojournalists Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros were killed in a mortar attack in the Libyan city of Misrata. Two other journalists were wounded. I interviewed Tim while he was in Britain recently to promote a documentary he filmed over more than a year at a remote American military outpost in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. He was well aware of the dangers of his job but he didn't let them overwhelm him. For journalists, war is traumatic, but there are a lot of traumatic things in life, he told me. You can have a car crash, you can have a messy divorce, you can lose a child, and you have to get back up and get on with your life. I hope my battered old leg will remind people that although working as a journalist in a hostile environment can at times be the best job in the world, it can also involve considerable personal risk. And when things go wrong, the consequences can be life changing.
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Kate Adie
Stuart Hughes so who will be ruling Libya in the future? The country's foreign minister, Abdelati Alabaidi, has certainly implied that the future of Colonel Gaddafi could be up for discussion. Mr. Alobaidi said in a BBC interview that the solution for the country's future had to be found in Libya by Libyans. He added that after a ceasefire, an interim period of six months could be followed by UN supervised elections, and it would be up to the Libyan people to decide who contested them. Justin Marozi, who's just back from Libya, tells us about one family which some feel could be qualified to take par
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Justin Marozzi
it wasn't the sort of welcome I was expecting after 19 hours in the back of a flimsy Hayundai saloon, flying along at top speed with a driver distracted by two mobile phones. I'd been hoping for something a little friendlier, but Sheikh Mohammed Sanusi, the local imam in Jagbub, a tiny desert oasis in eastern Libya, was in uncompromising mood. I'm angry with Christians and Jews, he begins. Why is that? I ask, slightly taken aback. Because the Christian and Jewish holy books have been changed many times over the centuries. The Quran has been unaltered for 1400 years. You should read the Quran, become a Muslim and earn your place in paradise. I tried to change the conversation, but the sheikh isn't having any of it. Obstinately, he sticks to his guns, relating various miracles and prophecies of the Prophet Muhammad. It's hard to get a word in edjways. My mission is not so much to discuss religion than to see what, if anything, is left of the famous Senussi order that once held sway here. The order was an Islamic revivalist movement of orthodox Sufis established in the Arabian desert by Sheikh Mohammed ibn Ali Senussi, aka the Grand Senussi. In 1837, it spread right across North Africa and went as far west as Senegal through a network of zawiyas, or religious lodges. In 1856, the Grand Senussi founded a zawiya in Jagbub, which grew to become the headquarters of the Order and Africa's second greatest university after Al Azhar in Cairo. When Libya achieved independence under a constitutional monarchy in 1951, it was no coincidence that a member of the Senussi family, Idris, became king. The family and the Order had won lasting respect by providing education to the masses and mediating difficult local tribal and trade disputes. The Idris monarchy proved a benign institution for Libya during its 18 years. The nationalist detractors criticized it for being ineffectual and too pro Western. Gaddafi toppled king Idris in 1969 and sought to marginalize the Sanusis with a vengeance. Idris heir and his family were first imprisoned, then sent into exile in London, having been forced to watch their house burnt to cinders by the regime. Then in 1988, Gaddafi sent the bulldozers into Jagbub and the Great Zawiya was razed to the ground. It took 11 days for them to destroy it, Sheikh Mohammed says, as if it was yesterday. Then they finished it off with 17 explosions. He takes me outside and we walk across a vast expanse of rubble, sizzling beneath the white desert sun. 47,000 square meters of smashed marble, white stone, date palm trunks, rusting wires and nails. Nothing within the old compound remains standing. The destruction of such an important part of Libya's cultural heritage is all the more chilling for being left as it is. Yet with Gaddafi now gone from eastern Libya, it cannot be too long before the bulldozers return to Jaghbub and the Great Zawiya rises from the ashes. The Sheikh says he's not interested in discussing Gaddafi or the Libyan revolution. His only interest is in God. The one concern he does express, probably unique in any commentary on the Arab Spring to date, is if the violence in the region continues, so many men will lose their lives that the ratio of women to men will increase to 50 to 1. This will lead to outbreaks of lesbianism and same sex marriages that will represent a real problem for Muslim society. The translator, entirely deferential up to this point, looks a little embarrassed. However hard he tried to crush the Senussis, prison, exile, executions and bulldozers were his preferred methods. Gaddafi could never completely erase the family and their followers from Libya and Libyan history. Today the Senussi story continues in Benghazi, where Hajj Ahmed Zubair Senussi is a member of the Transitional national council. Now 77, he was the world's longest serving political prisoner, languishing behind bars from 1970 to 2001. Four more years than Nelson Mandela. During that time, Gaddafi never commuted the death sentence that hung over him. Every time a door opened, I never knew if it was going to be someone taking me to my execution, he says. Dignified and quietly spoken in a pinstripe suit and tie, he talks without rancour, resolutely upbeat about the formidable challenges ahead. There are few demands for a monarchy to be restored here. But amid the confusion and euphoria in Benghazi, some Libyans look at Haj Ahmed and dare to wonder Whether, after almost 42 years of dictatorship, the Senussi name may yet return to the forest.
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Kate Adie
Justin Marozi Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen There have been times in the last couple of months when it seemed as if no corner of the Arab world would escape an overturning of the old order. But the passing of time has revealed that the consequences of these public uprisings aren't easy to predict. Among the nations of the Gulf, only Bahrain has experienced serious unrest, and that's been quietened, at least for the moment, by forceful action by the authorities. Robin Lustig spent the last few days in the Gulf region trying to assess how much demand there really is for change.
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Robin Lustig
When I was at university, which is quite a long time ago now, the word students was often preceded by the word revolting. The adjective had a useful double meaning revolting in the sense that they were, or thought they were engaged in a revolt against the status quo. But revolting also in the sense that they caused feelings of revulsion in in at least some of their elders long haired, unwashed, loudmouthed and lazy. Who wouldn't find them revolting? Well, I've spent the past few days here in the Gulf talking to students, and by no stretch of the imagination could anyone describe them as revolting in either sense of the word. Elsewhere in the Arab world, in Tunisia and Egypt, in Libya and Syria, students may have been in the forefront of the protests. But here in Qatar and in Oman, they are by and large the very opposite of revolting. Qatar and Oman are very different countries. Qatar, by some definitions, is the richest country in the world, and it has the fastest growing economy. Oman, on the other hand, with its relatively limited oil reserves fast running out, is one of the poorer countries in the Gulf. But even there, students say they have very little to complain about. I met a group of them at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, the Omani capital. It's a vast modern campus, the only publicly funded university in a country that's about the same size as the UK. But with a population of only around 3 million, the students were launching the country's first ever student newspaper. A sign, they said, of how the winds of change are blowing even in ultra conservative Oman. But if you imagine them in scruffy jeans and T shirts, you couldn't be more wrong. The men were wearing the traditional white Gulf robes, head to toe, spotless and immaculately pressed, accompanied by a characteristic woven Omani cap on their heads. The women were all in black, again covered head to toe, their hair covered but not their faces. Conservative in their dress and largely conservative in their outlook, they know they're the lucky ones. A degree from Sultan Qaboos University means they shouldn't have much trouble finding a job. Unlike many other young Omanis who complain that they can't find jobs anywhere, the students at Sultan Qaboos won't hear a word said against the Sultan himself. He's a man who's ruled Oman as an absolute monarch for the past 40 years, and he's credited with having transformed it into a modern nation. When the wave of uprisings started sweeping through the Arab world, Omani students each received a gift from the Sultan of a thousand riyals. That's about 1600 pounds. I asked them if it was a bribe to keep them quiet. Absolutely not. They insisted it was simply a welcome gesture from a ruler who cares for his people. There are problems in Oman, though. At least two people were killed in protests in the industrial port city of Sohar at the end of February. And there's still a round the clock protesters camp outside the Majlis Alshura, the consultative assembly to which Sultan Qaboos says he now wants to give real legislative power. He's also sacked 12 of his cabinet ministers. He's promised to create 50,000 new jobs and he's raised the minimum wage. The message from the top is he's heard his people's demands. So what about students here in Qatar? Well, they're even better off than the ones in Oman. This is a country that, with its massive reserves of oil and natural gas, has just about everything that money can buy, and they know it. We do have everything we could possibly want, said one of them. But don't they want more freedom, more democracy, like students in Tunisia and Egypt have been demanding? Not really, it seems, and that's why Qataris haven't been out protesting. If you have everything you want, there really isn't anything to protest about. The Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, likes his country to be talked about Qatar controversially was chosen to host the World cup in 2022. It gives generously to good causes around the world. $100 million for example, to the US after the hurricane Katrina disaster. And now it's taken the lead in providing warplanes for the NATO led military operation in Libya, with Arab pilots who might be called on to shoot at Arab targets. So Qatar uses its wealth to buy influence. It's on good terms with both the US and Iran. It does spread its wealth around, even if most of the foreign workers here, and they do make up the vast bulk of the population, don't see all that much of it. I asked my Nepali taxi driver. Oh yes, we journalists do still talk to taxi drivers to find out what's really going on, if he has a good life here. He smiled but said nothing. Even in the richest country in the world, there are lines it's better not to cross.
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Kate Adie
Robin Lustig the Ethiopian government's launched a programme to introduce health care to far flung rural areas. The vast majority of the population lives in the countryside. It's one of the least urbanised countries in the world. But the plan faces formidable difficulties. Many Ethiopians live miles from towns or cities and have no experience of seeking help or advice from doctors or nurses. And the situation is not helped by the fact that hundreds of doctors leave the country each year to go to work abroad. Claudia Hammond travelled two hours south east of the capital Addis Ababa to meet one of the young people the government's hoping will improve the health of people living in country areas.
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Claudia Hammond
Inalam Taya is 23 years old, but her tiny frame makes her look like a slight teenager. She sits confidently in the single story building she shares with another young woman health worker. She doesn't wear a uniform, save for a bright blue watch marked with a tiny Ethiopian flag and the words Health extension worker, with which denote that she's now qualified to get to this remote health post. I drive out into the countryside, past rows of billy cans filled with water suspended in wicker work bags ready to sell to passing truck drivers. Then hundreds of tropical plants lined up in plastic bags in what appeared to be miles and miles of garden centres next to each other along the roadside, high school students stream past in school uniforms in a shade of mauve exactly matching the blossom on the jacaranda trees. Further out into the countryside, the land is flat and dry and on the right, set back from the road, is a building all on its own. Iinalam's health post Einalam is not a doctor, nor a nurse, and she's had just one year's training as a health extension worker. The emphasis, she tells me, is on prevention. She gives tests for hiv, AIDS and TB and treats malaria, as well as offering antenatal care for more complex ailments. She can refer patients on to a larger clinic, still without any doctors, but where some surgery can be done. Every inch of wall space here is covered with posters charting the successes of Unalum and her colleague. She's clearly very proud of her health post and apologises for the piles of supplies which have just been delivered. She adds casually that she and her colleague also deliver all the babies. This was why she'd wanted to train for this job. She says so many women she'd known had died during pregnancy or childbirth that she was determined to find a way to stop these deaths from happening. It seems like a lot of responsibility for one so young, I thought. But she's not daunted and wants to undertake further study to become a doctor. The authorities here chose an alum and her female colleague for the jobs here because they think women are more likely to remain in these communities for longer. This is part of an ambitious plan by the Ethiopian government to get healthcare out into every rural area where 85% of the population live. 32,000 women have been trained so far. It's difficult to get qualified doctors to work out here. Hundreds, anyway, leave the country every year to go and work abroad. And those who remain often are not keen on moving to the countryside when they could be living in a city with a 24 hour electricity supply and other facilities. I go to meet five students at the oldest medical school in the capital, Addis Ababa. They all seem very committed to their studies and put up with sitting on the floor in overcrowded lecture theatres to complete their studies. But four out of the five tell me that once their training is finished, they plan to leave as soon as possible. They insist it's not just about the money. They've been learning how to save lives, but say that in hospitals without drips or basic antibiotics, these skills are not worth much. They're training in order to save people, and instead they know they might have to watch them die. The dean of the medical school tells me about a new rule which compels them to work for two years in the countryside or four years in the capital before they can receive their medical certificates and can leave the country. The government's other plan is to encourage more and more people to become doctors, so that if some leave, there'll still be Lots of others to tend to the people of Ethiopia. Just as the Dean's answering my last question, I start to feel sick. Realising I must have food poisoning, I drop the microphone and flee his office. After taking some basic antibiotics that I've brought from the uk. It's not long before I've recovered, but looking at the name on the label, I realise these are the same basic drugs the medical students were complaining that they couldn't get, part of the reason they want to go and work elsewhere. Back at the health post, I learn that Inalam is something of a star, as she's now persuaded 514 local families to sign up with her. This is no mean achievement, as she's had to win the trust of people who up to now have had little experience of professional healthcare. She says she's determined to save lives. The most satisfying part of her work, she tells me, is safely delivering a tiny baby and knowing the mother is still alive too. I really love my job, she says with a smile.
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Kate Adie
Claudia Hammond in Ethiopia, acres of British newsprint and comment are dedicated each year to the differences between us and our nearest neighbours, the French. They, on the other hand, seem much less interested in us. Maybe that's partly because in Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Italy, Spain and Switzerland, they have many more neighbours than we do. But one of those differences concerns accommodation on the other side of the Channel, urban families tend to live in apartments. Here in the uk, they prefer to go for their own house. Our man in Paris, Hugh Schofield, a flat dweller there since the 1990s, has been wondering how this habitational divide has affected the development of our separate species.
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Robin Lustig
The shibboleth is an amusing thing. As the Hebrew Bible teaches us, it's a way of distinguishing between two groups of people on the basis of an expression which only one group can pronounce. I've always thought that for the French, the perfect shibboleth is the Paris commuter rail system, the rer. Except you can't say rer. You have to use the French phonemes so it comes out like an inarticulate guttural snarl. After 15 years, I still can't do it properly. A variant of the shibboleth is the culturally specific object that's incomprehensible to the foreigner. Marmite is a good British one. French people genuinely retch when they're persuaded to try a piece of bread and Marmite. And for the French, my vote goes for the round wax lump known as the Boule Quies, roughly the quiet ball. No one outside France Perhaps not even the most brilliant of linguists knows what is a boule quaise. It's the trade name for a brand of earplug that's become so familiar to the French over the years that it now means earplug. If you go to a chemist and ask for a bouchon dore, which literally means earplug, they won't know what you're talking about. It would be like going to a grocer in Britain and asking for a pot of black yeast paste. But ask for a box of boulquiers. Well, it's a good feeling, like you've cracked a code. I'm a regular purchaser of boulequ because they've become, for me, an essential accoutrement of apartment living. In apartments, you learn to accommodate. None of my neighbours is noisy, quite the contrary. But they're there, I sense them. And so when I sleep, I zone them out with my wonderful bulquies. The creaking floorboards, the washing machine, the dog two floors down, the energetic lovers, they all blissfully disappear. Though, as I say, it's not as if Paris neighbours are noisy. In fact, people who are culturally accustomed, as here, to living in flats and tend to be highly considerate. Living in London, I remember being driven mad by the music of neighbours and the bass beat pounding through the ceiling. Here in Paris, that's a much rarer experience. Even in summer, with all the windows open, it's normally quiet. People know not to break the rules. And that's the point about apartment life, the rules. In Paris, people have always lived in flats. In the old days, the houses were divided up so that the wealthier you were, the higher you lived. The gentleman in the upper story, the humble shopkeeper down below. Today, that spirit of social mingling, la mixite, as the French call it, is very much alive, in theory at least, as every town hall or mairie is by law obliged to ensure that there's a minimum proportion of social housing. And over the years, that proximity has led to codes of behavior. In apartments, you get to know your neighbours much more intimately than perhaps they or you would like. So you learn to keep your relationship one of formal distance, respectful but not friendly. You learn not to express your independence too readily by playing music late or having parties or running a bath at midnight. And you learn that there are overarching institutions that decide things for you, such as whether to plant flowers in the communal garden or how much to pay the concierge. In short, you learn to give up a bit of liberty in return for a more social, communal life. Obviously, this has an impact on society as a whole. And I'm certain that the fact that French and other European societies are more socially minded, both less free and less individualistic, is linked to the habits of apartment living. Though whether people live in flats because they're more communal minded or vice versa, they're more communal minded because they live in flats is moot. But there's a final thing to say on this subject, which is maybe the most significant thing of all. In France, more and more people are not living in apartments. Travel in the Paris region today and you'll see hundreds of dormitory settlements building up, with once typical rural villages being transformed into commuter towns with not tier upon tier of flats, but row upon row of bijou houses, each with its private strip of garden. Maybe it's human destiny, but France, too, is going the way of the ticky, tacky boxers, as the old protest song once put it, suburbanizing fast and heading into town on the aur air.
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Kate Adie
And with Hugh Scofield still practicing those rers, let's leave it at that. It's time for us to go. I'll be there with more from our own correspondence far and wide next Saturday morning. I hope you'll join us then. Goodbye.