← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Dec 10, 2011
00:28:04
'A political system which had considered itself as solid as rock has started to show...
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Hello, this is the.
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From our own correspondent office in Bush House in London.
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We also make editions of the programme for the BBC World Service, but you've downloaded the latest Radio 4 programme.
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It's presented by Kate Ady.
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Hello. More demonstrations are taking place across Russia this morning. They're protesting about alleged election fraud and against Vladimir Putin himself. What exactly has been achieved in Iraq? There's claim and counterclaim as the Americans finally pack their bags. Also today, the ripple effect of the Eurozone crisis. In Hungary, the homeless queues are getting longer and we're climbing the mountains of eastern Cuba and asking awkward questions about Fidel Castro's love life. Protesters in Russia are taking part in some of the biggest demonstrations the country's seen for more than a decade. They're calling for a rerun of parliamentary elections. There's a heavy police presence in Moscow, where tens of thousands of people have assembled. In Revolution Square. Another large demonstration is underway in St Petersburg. Rallies are also taking place elsewhere in the country. In last Sunday's election, the governing United Russia Party of Vladimir Putin narrowly won a majority in Parliament. Steve Rosenberg in Moscow says the Kremlin's watching today's events very closely.
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On August 23, 1989, 2 million Soviet citizens linked arms and formed a human chain. It stretched 400 miles from Estonia, through Latvia and into Lithuania. The Baltic chain was an astonishing act of defiance to Soviet rule. It was clear the three Baltic republics wanted out of the ussr. A few days later, I arrived in Moscow with a group of British students as part of our Russian studies. We were going to be spending a year in the ussr. It was an exhilarating time. Glasnost and perestroika were opening up what had been a tightly closed society. But at the same time, the economy was collapsing. We were even given ration cards to buy sugar. Having seen the Baltic chain on tv, I remember wondering, could this be the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union? I soon dismissed the thought. Everyone I talked to, Russian friends, teachers at the language institute, they all believed that, yes, the USSR had its problems, but. But it wasn't in danger of disappearing. Just two years later, Communist hardliners in Moscow botched their clumsy coup and half a million protesters took to the streets. The empire collapsed. I was back in the Russian capital on Christmas Day 1991, the day the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin to mark the official end of the ussr. The world's largest state had collapsed like a house of cards. Putin's Russia is not Soviet Russia, but there is something Oddly familiar about what's happening here today. A political system which had considered itself as solid as rock has begun to show cracks. When Vladimir Putin came to power more than a decade ago, Russia was weak. So on the ruins of 70 years of communism and 10 years of wild capitalism, Mr. Putin began to build his system. He called it the vertical of power. It was a pyramid with an all powerful Putin at the top and everyone down below following orders. This, he believed, was what Russia needed to ensure stability. Soon the state was back in control. The powerful oligarchs had either fled abroad or pledged their loyalty, or, in the case of Mikhail Khadarkovsky, been put in jail. The main TV channels had all been brought to heel and Mr. Putin's party, United Russia, had become the dominant force in what was widely seen as a rubber stamp parliament. The Kremlin spoke about managed democracy. Opposition parties could take part in elections, but only those parties, which the Kremlin saw as no real threat. Vocal Opponents of Mr. Putin were pushed to the fringes. Their parties denied registration. Anti Putin protests did happen, but they were tiny and often ended in protesters being arrested. Vladimir Putin seemed in complete control until last weekend's parliamentary elections. Even in this system of stage managed democracy, Mr. Putin's party took a drubbing at the polls. Officially, it lost more than 70 seats, and that amid widespread allegations of vote rigging across the country. Online, the blogosphere was bursting with talk of election fraud. From ballot box stuffing to so called carousel voting. People being driven from polling station to polling station to vote several times for the party of power, there has been a surge of public anger. The Internet has been instrumental in channeling this and bringing protesters onto the streets. Moscow this week has seen some of the largest anti government demonstrations in years. A strange mixture of Russian nationalists and liberals calling for the election results to be annulled and for a fresh ballot. At one protest on Tuesday, I spoke to a student called Maria. Along with the crowd, she was chanting Russia without Putin. It was the first time Maria had ever come out to protest against the country's leader. I'm tired of our government, Maria told me. I'm tired of Putin. I want change. Which is why this week I keep thinking about the Baltic chain and about what happened to the Soviet Union. And I've been asking myself the same question I asked more than 20 years ago under pressure from the people. Could the current system fall apart? How strong really is the vertical of power? It may not be as strong as its architect would like to think. This week I went along to a pro Putin rally near Red Square. It came across as unspontaneous and unconvincing. One of the crowd, a teenager called Sergei, said he and his friends had been bussed in specially from samara, more than 500 miles away. But no one has told me anything, sergei admitted. I've got no idea why I'm here.
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Steve Rosenberg in Moscow. The American's nine year long military adventure in Iraq formally comes to an end next week. Four and a half thousand of their troops have lost their lives. Conservative estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians killed exceed 100,000. Other estimates are far higher. Most historians will record that the main achievement of this mission, which may have cost as much as a trillion dollars, was the overthrow and then the death of the dictator Saddam Hussein. But there'll be little celebration surrounding the withdrawal next week. A flag will be lowered at a low key ceremony in Baghdad, and then a convoy car carrying troops and kit will head off south and cross the border into Kuwait before being flown home to the us Gabriel Gatehouse says opinions are sharply divided about what exactly the American departure will mean for Iraq.
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We hadn't been on the square long when a skinny man came up to talk to us. He was wearing a suit jacket that was several sizes too large for him and dark aviator style shades, despite the fact that the winter sunshine wasn't terribly bright. Perhaps he wanted to remain anonymous, I thought, but he was pretty distinctive looking anyway. With his long black hair scraped back into a ponytail, he glanced nervously up towards a balcony across the road. We were being watched. His name was Dirham Al Zaidi, and you might say that dissent runs in his family. His brother Muntada had famously thrown both his shoes at then President George W. Bush. Dirham and his dwindling band of fellow demonstrators are protesting against the Iraqi government. It may be democratically elected, they say, but its performance is dismal. The country is plagued by violence, rampant corruption, and there's a lack of jobs and even basic services. He and most of his friends have been arrested for speaking their mind. Some have disappeared for days into prison cells, been savagely beaten. Many have given up in the face of such intimidation. But Dirham keeps on coming back. He's been on Baghdad's Tahrir Square almost every Friday since February. Back then, they'd gathered there in their thousands. Their central grievance was much the same as that of the crowds on the streets of Cairo, Tunis or Benghazi. The sense that somehow a small elite had monopolized their country's resources. In Iraq, too, the protests were initially met with violence. Bat on wielding security forces cleared the square with water cannon and live rounds. Around 20 protesters were killed. But that was not the remarkable fact. The remarkable fact was that no suicide bomber had blown himself up in the crowd. The remarkable fact was that the death toll was so low. And so the Prime Minister, Nouri Al Maliki, congratulated the security services on a successful operation and the wider world ignored the matter altogether. Iraq is yesterday's story. Or is it? Here are some figures. According to official statistics, 187 Iraqis were killed last month in what may be termed terrorist act. Bombings mostly, but shootings too. Actually, a further 55 people were also killed, those described as terrorists themselves. That figure was significantly lower than October's total of 258 dead, not including the terrorists, a figure that was itself at the lower end of average for the year. All of that is apparently good news for the departing Americans. In their unwavering public optimism, they point to an improving security situation even as the last of their troops pack their bags. Much of the Iraqi public see things rather differently. If there's one thing that currently unites this divided people, it's their firm belief that the United States is responsible for their every single woe. Apache electricity supply. Blame the US suicide bombings. The Americans are behind them. Political deadlock, government corruption, a regionally resurgent Iran. It's all a Yankee conspiracy. I had a conversation the other day with a close advisor to the Prime Minister. He's normally a fairly sober minded gentleman, but he tried to persuade me in all seriousness that Iraq's current mess was the result not of poor planning, not of disastrous decisions taken after the invasion in 2003, but a deliberate and continuing US policy designed to weaken Iraq's position in the Middle East. This notion is as ludicrous as the counter assertion I heard a day later from a spokesman for the American Embassy in Baghdad. He said with a perfectly straight face that there was hardly a family in Iraq whose life had not benefited in some way from the US's actions here. The American withdrawal will be a moment of truth. Once the last armored vehicles have rumbled across the desert frontier into Kuwait, the US legacy will become clearer. Some of Iraq's current problems will doubtless fade along with the departing invaders. Others will probably become more acute in their absence, at least in the short term. Last month in Baghdad, I paid a visit to the National Archive. In a room packed floor to ceiling with history books that had once belonged to Saddam Hussein, I met Saad Iskander, one of Iraq's most eloquent and thoughtful men. He was scathing about America's record over the past eight and a half years. But when I asked him if he thought it had all been worth it, he said yes. To live as a free man for a short time is better than to live a hundred years as a slave. I thought back to Dirham Al Zaydi, the shoe thrower's brother, and his nervous eyes on Tahrir Square. It still takes a lot of guts to speak your mind in the new free Iraq.
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Gabriel Gatehouse European leaders have been returning home after the summit seen as critical not only to the future of the European Union but also to Britain's continuing membership. 26 of the 27 EU countries agreed to forge a tighter fiscal union by March next year, although some are still waiting for endorsement from their national parliaments. Only Britain refused to sign up to a new treaty, saying such an accord would have compromised its sovereignty. Some believe the deal struck in Brussels in the early hours of yesterday is a curtain raiser for a new multi speed Europe. Hungary is one of those countries on the outer rim, Nick Thorpe, our man in Budapest, says more and more people there are feeling the pinch.
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You cannot see the little cluster of container homes from the main street. They're sandwiched in a yard between a five star hotel and the Southern Railway station. But you can tell this is a homeless shelter from the emblems on the side of the Maltese charity vehicles and the faces of the old people taking a little of the late autumn sun on their faces before lunch is served in the canteen. After years living under bridges and in subways, they're grateful for every morsel they can get. This is the carrot to come in off the streets, but there is also a stick. Since December 1, homelessness has been banned from the streets of the Hungarian capital. If you're caught sleeping on the street twice, you can be sent to jail. At the same time, new hostile places are becoming available in order to try to absorb the influx. It's a drastic attempt to solve a problem which has festered for years, but which is getting dramatically worse and changing its spots as a result of the economic crisis. Like the government, we also have zero tolerance for homelessness, says Miklos Vece of the Maltese Charity Service. And like the city authorities, we agree that the city's capacity to absorb the homeless is now stretched to the limit. He estimates that there are 10,000 homeless people in Budapest, half of them in the city, half in caves and forests on the perimeter. But his solution is slower and not so drastic as the one approved by Parliament last month, which the police are now trying to enforce, it's important to see each homeless person as a separate story. Those who arouse such fury among the middle class, those who urinate on the tram and rant and rave, are those least likely to be able to take advantage of new, hostile places. They're the most ill, with serious psychiatric and alcohol problems, with lung illnesses. Punishing them will not help. The new law has provoked a wave of outrage. A night of solidarity with the homeless was held as soon as the regulation came into force. And the parliamentary ombudsman, Mate Sobo, has taken the unprecedented step of challenging the new law in the Constitutional Court. At another hostel in the o? Buda district, 34 year old Antaljonas is looking for a place to stay with his pregnant homeless wife. At the moment, he's in one shelter, she is in another. When their baby is born on 18 December, she tells me proudly, they want to find a room together. He has been homeless for 10 years, he says, since his first wife turned him out. Sometimes he gets jobs laying cables in the street. He's a member of a work gang of 20 men. But in the last months there is less and less work. He says the crisis is not just affecting the very poor, it. It's eroding the middle class. Hungary has its very own mortgage crisis. 1.2 million people have loans in foreign currencies, mostly Swiss francs. As the Hungarian foreign crumbles and the Swiss franc soars, they are increasingly unable to pay during the winter months. The government enforces a moratorium on evictions, but that will almost certainly be lifted in the spring. We're not seeing the latest mortgage casualties on the street yet, says Miklos Vece of the Maltese charity. This is a time bomb which will blow up in a couple of years. An astonishing 92% of adult Hungarians own property. There has been a dire shortage of cheap flats for rent, since local councils sold off all the property in their possession in the early 1990s. As people go into debt, the Miklos Vece explains, they beg and borrow a place to stay or a little cash from one relative after another. Then the family usually breaks up under the strain, and the father often ends up on the street. Our job is to get families to safety before that happens. He blames the new law on the impatience of the middle classes and of certain deputies of the governing Fides party, some of them also inner city mayors. Lunch arrives in big steel drums at the hostel near the south Station cabbage and pea soup, then pasta with chicken sauce. The men eat hungrily to the music of building work. Next door, new containers are being set up just across the yard. In the next few days, another 30 or so homeless people will get a temporary home.
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And that's Nick Thorpe. There'll be celebrations and a military parade in the Bangladeshi capital next week. They're marking the 40th anniversary of the day the Pakistani army surrendered to the Indian army in Dhaka. It meant Pakistan had lost its eastern wing and Bangladesh was born. Mark Tully recalls reporting from that country in the early stages of the ten month long uprising by the Mukti Bahini, the self styled Bengali freedom fighters. He believes that a realistic assessment of what happened four decades ago could prevent the celebrations, adding to the legacy of bitterness left by Pakistan's humiliation.
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I was in the first party of journalists to be allowed to travel freely in the then East Pakistan after the army crackdown started. By this time the army had regained control over all the major towns, but evidence of the crackdown remained. Dhaka was silent and surly, with normally crowded streets remarkably empty. In the university, rockets had blasted halls of residence and a police barracks had been heavily shelled. Driving west from Dhaka, I saw the results of the scorched earth policy the army had adopted to establish control over the countryside and restore communications. All along the highway, roadside villages had been burnt and were deserted. I entered one small town where the bazaar had been set ablaze and the entire population appeared to have fled. Everywhere I went, the army and the Punjabi police brought in from West Pakistan to enforce martial law were very much in evidence. I experienced the bitterness between Bengalis and Punjabis. When a Punjabi policeman arrested me for taking photographs at the police station, the Bengali officer in charge berated the Punjabi, saying, you people come to our country, you can't speak our language, you don't know our customs, you don't even understand the orders of your own government. These journalists are allowed to photograph whatever they like. Major Siddiq Salik, the Pakistan army public relations officer, tall and formidable, with his close cropped black hair, dark, neat military mustache and narrow eyes, managed to keep tabs on our every move. We also had regular briefings from the suave Major General Rao Farman Ali, who was in charge of the civil administration. He maintained there was no question of a political solution to the uprising. The answer had to be military. Although the army had restored control and was meeting little resistance, operations were continuing in the form of what were called sweep operations and and clearing operations. The former were house searches, the latter were full scale military operations against areas where there were reports that the Mukti Bohini rebels had gathered. Field guns and mortars were used in these clearing operations. Salik wrote a book called Witness to Surrender when he eventually got back to Pakistan after two years in an Indian prisoner of war camp. In it he quoted a fellow officer who'd conducted a clearing operation based on faulty information as saying only poor country folk, mostly women and old men, got roasted in the barrage of fire. I'll carry this burden on my conscience for the rest of my life. When I read Salik's book, I discovered that General Raul Ferman Ali didn't believe in a military solution and had in fact been pressing for an amnesty, but was told the time for politics is over. It probably was. In the months that followed, it became more and more clear that India was keeping the pot boiling with its support for the Mukti Bohini and was planning a full scale invasion. The Mukti Bohini's record was scarred by atrocities committed against supporters of the government. The Pakistan army raised some 50,000 volunteers, known as razakas and gave them a license to kill. Undoubtedly, Pakistan's reliance on a military solution to the uprising in its eastern wing is largely to be blamed for those blood stained months. However, if Bangladesh and India openly accepted that right wasn't entirely on their side, then they might avoid celebrating this 40th anniversary triumphantly and pouring salt on Pakistan's wounded pride. Unfortunately, countries rarely behave like that, so the celebrations will only serve to remind Pakistanis of their humiliation, which will do nothing to mitigate the bitterness and suspicion that characterises relations between the countries of South Asia.
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Mark Talley there now. The names of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro are firmly associated with the revolution in Cuba. Rather less well known is that of Celia Sanchez. Yet she was one of the key figures in the revolt against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. When Castro came to power in 1959, Celia Sanchez ran his office in Havana and was responsible for numerous revolutionary projects in the until her death in 1980. Yet outside Cuba, little has been written about her. Most of the articles which do exist speculate about whether Fidel Castro and Celia Sanchez were lovers. Linda Presley's been to La Plata, once Castro's rebel camp in the mountains of eastern Cuba. To find out more about this enigmatic
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woman, a small white spaceship has landed. There's a bullet hole in one side and it looks totally incongruous. In a room where everything is hewn from timber, this enormous oil powered 1950s fridge is centre stage in what was Fidel Castro's small wooden two room cabin. I wonder if it was Celia Sanchez, with her legendary organisational skills, who arranged its transport up here by mule. Getting to La Plata, Castro's last headquarters in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra, is a muddy, rocky scramble. My guide, Aldo, is unfazed by the two mile hike. I, meanwhile, tottered gingerly behind him, humiliated as ever by my embarrassing lack of balance. At last we approach the camp where every building is camouflaged by thick vegetation. In the Sierra Maestra, during the guerrilla war against Batista, Celia Sanchez, a middle class doctor's daughter, took care of food, clothes, arms, everything needed to sustain the rebel forces. And her hand is everywhere in the well preserved camp. Aldo points out the tropical gardens she planted over 50 years. The White butterfly, Cuba's national flower. Blousy crimson amapola. The orchids she loved and that a devastated Castro would place on her coffin in 1980. Celia Sanchez would remain Fidel Castro's most precious aid until she died from lung cancer. And that, in Cuba at least, is the official line. But maybe it doesn't quite cover it all, because ever since these two committed revolutionaries met, there's been speculation they were lovers. From outside Fidel's house, we peer into the bedroom. There's a generous double bed. Aldo says Fidel didn't use it much. He preferred a hammock. Where did Celia sleep? I ask. Next door, he says, gesturing to the room with a spaceship fridge. So, I say tentatively. What do you think, Aldo? Were they lovers? No, he says. An elegant soliloquy follows about how the twin souls of Fidel and Celia were committed to fighting injustice. And he says there's no evidence to say they were. Well, actually there is, but you'll struggle to find it in Cuba. Across the choppy Florida Straits, 92 year old Uber Matos lives in Miami. Here at the center of gravity of Cuban exiles. He's a hero who dared to confront Fidel Castro in Cuba. He's a disgraced former commandante who betrayed the revolution and served 20 years in prison for treason and sedition. Huber Matos, who was here at la Plata in 1958 with Celia Sanchez and Fidel Castro, says they were lovers. So what does it matter? I hear some of you asking. Well, every detail of Cuba's revolutionary history is contested territory. For loyalists on the island. The Celia Fidel story is about a deep and shared commitment to the revolutionary project. For the anti Castro exile community, it's about diluting and tainting that political commitment with Sex. And the absence of any declaration from the protagonists means the waters aren't muddied on either side. Fidel Castro has never talked publicly at length about Celia Sanchez. Some say it's just simply too upsetting for him. And as far as we know, Celia didn't keep a diary herself. And after the 1950s, she never had any lover anyone could tell me about, or a husband or children. So there's no close personal testimony either. Once Fidel Castro was in power, Celia handled all his most secret communications. She was right there in the room, chain smoking Chesterfield cigarettes as Cuban industry was nationalized during the missile crisis. But frustratingly, we have no idea exactly what her input was. In Cuba, it's Fidel Castro who's given the credit for generating ideas and Celia Sanchez who was charged with making them happen. But given her intelligence and political commitment, I find it hard to believe she wasn't actually making policy. Maybe I just want to think that. But the narrative of the revolution is so skewed towards Fidel Castro and since his death, Che Guevara, that unassuming Celia, who always ducked the limelight, never really got a look in. And let's face it, it's not uncommon for a woman to be underestimated by history. We begin the stumble down from La Plata, negotiating the giant tree roots and mud. I tease Aldo that with his agility and stamina, he's like that mule that carried the spaceship Fridge up to where Fidel and Celia stayed. He thinks this is quite a good joke. And then with his face lit up, he tells me how the entwined destiny of Fidel and Celia is one of the most beautiful stories he knows. For him, Celia Sanchez is an icon of the revolution. To me, she's almost as elusive and enigmatic as ever.
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Linda Presley. And you can hear more about her research in the mountains of eastern Cuba in the Sunday feature on Radio 3 tomorrow evening. But that's it for now. I'll be here again with more correspondence, Tales from Far and Wide next Saturday morning. I hope you'll join us. Goodbye.