← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Dec 18, 2010
00:28:09
Three years in America: Kevin Connolly has time to reflect as he prepares to leave an...
Loading summary
Transcript13 lines
- [00:00]
A
You're listening to a download from the BBC.
- [00:02]
B
This is from our own correspondent. If you'd like to listen to the edition broadcast on the BBC World Service
- [00:08]
C
and presented by Alan Johnston, please go
- [00:11]
B
to the from our own correspondent website or to that of the BBC World Service. But here is the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
- [00:20]
D
Did our correspondent really draw his final conclusions about the United States? Three minutes after first arriving there, it's Kevin Connolly's valedictory dispatch. Today he also reveals why he knows every word of the song. If I knew you were coming, I'd have baked a cake. After that, the Roman Catholic cathedral in North Africa where Muslims go to pray. And bumping through the rain clouds over the jungles of Colombia, Frank Gardner on the most uncomfortable flight of his life. You've heard him in this program from Poland and Paris, Moscow and Minsk, Grozny and Guyana, Libya and Lithuania. And now Kevin Connolly is packing his bags again. In the new year, he'll be setting up in Jerusalem, an opportunity to come to grips with that never straightforward subject, Middle east politics. During three years based in Washington, he's visited 46 of America's 50 states and covered the election of its first black president. But what about its language and its people? Might there be more to say about its food and the portions? What about guns and religion, music, politics? All subjects you'll hear which he touches on in this, his farewell dispatch from Washington.
- [01:33]
B
Sometime around the middle of the 1830s, a young Frenchman called Alexis de Tocqueville travelled to the United States on a mission guaranteed to make Americans bristle with irritation. He was going to understand them and explain them. De Tocqueville was smart, Gallic and aristocratic. A 19th century version of the cheese eating surrender monkeys that 21st century Americans find so annoying. He left behind one or two books which are still worth reading. But his most important legacy was his simplest. After de Tocqueville, just about every European sent to the United States has treated the posting as an invitation to help diagnose the country's faults and suggest ways in which they might be fixed. Americans find this a little puzzling. After all, they reason, theirs is a country founded and created by migrants who who left the old world behind them. And it's generally the most energetic and resourceful people who flee old lives to build new worlds, leaving their less enterprising fellow countrymen behind them. So the arc of American development is naturally going to make the place less and less like the Old world, not more and more. But there is nevertheless a deep seated European instinct that says the United States might be all right if only it would tweak its attitude towards healthcare or gun control or the death penalty. But of course it wouldn't exactly be all right. It would just be Britain with bigger portions and better weather. My own introduction to the realities of the American century came at a rather less strategic level. As a very young child, I had a stammer. And when I was growing up, there was a theory that the rhythms and repetitions of popular songs could be useful tools for fixing this. So the great American songbook was drummed into me with such merciless kindness in my mother's kitchen that I can still remember nearly all the lyrics to this day. Postcards to the dreary Europe of the early 1960s from what we dimly perceive to be a brighter place, when age has finally shriven me of everything else I recollect across the ravaged wastes of memory, I know for certain I will still recollect every word of the Eileen Barton classic if I knew you were coming, I'd have baked a cake. A genuine contender to be considered the worst song ever written. Among our favourites was one called Delaware, which consists of a never ending string of puns based on American place names. What did Delaware boys. Why, she wore a brand new jersey. Of course, I'm still struck today by the charmless ingenuity of its witless wordplay. It doesn't tackle any of the really awkward states like Vermont or Utah, but it does manage a verse called why did Cali phone ya? In case you hadn't guessed. Incidentally, Cali was phoning to ask, how are ya? Hawaii? You see, the result of that early exposure to American culture, of course, is simple. When you come to live in America, you were shocked by the familiarity of the unfamiliar. You will already know a pretzel from a bagel and a Dodger from a Met. You know what the uniformed concierges at apartment buildings do, and you know what you must tip them at Christmas, the answers respectively being not much and too much. And there's something beguiling in that easy familiarity, but something misleading too. It tends to blind Europeans, and the British in particular, to any sense of just how foreign a place America can be. This is, after all, a country born out of a tax revolt during a rebellion against centralising authority, and then expanded by settlers who exchanged the comfort of the eastern seaboard for the dangers and opportunities of the wild interior. It's not surprising that a feisty skepticism towards government lingers in the politics Here, the Tea Party movement is successful because it taps into the deep American suspicion that all federal government, apart from defence spending, is a kind of bureaucratic boondoggle dreamed up by larcenist conspiracists in Washington to allow them to line their pockets by picking ours. And America, of course, is an intensely religious place, something which is not difficult to trace to its foundation by a band of hardly religious zealots. If anything, over time it's getting more religious rather than less. The motto In God We Trust wasn't added to American banknotes until the 1950s, for example. Americans tied themselves in knots two years ago, agonizing over whether a black man or a white woman could yet be elected president. But here is a safe prediction. It will be a very long time before an atheist or an agnostic gets anywhere near the White House, a stark contrast with Europe, where the opposite is increasingly the case, and our differences extend into this earthly realm too. To Europeans, for example, a gun is a weapon, pure and simple. To many, but not all Americans, it is a badge of independence and self reliance, the tool of the engaged citizen who doesn't think that either the criminal or the forces of the state should have a monopoly on deadly force. Show us a gun and we picture a muscular ne' er do well in a balaclava menacing an elderly sub postmistress. An American is more likely to visualise a plucky homesteader crouching behind an overturned sofa in a burning ranch house, preparing to defend his family to the death. These things too are familiar enough, but a country so large, so restless and so energetic is necessarily full of surprises and contradictory impulses, too. This is, after all, the land that gave us prohibition and then invented organised crime to get around it. American writing, for example, beguiles and exasperates in equal measure. Its newspapers, with one or two exceptions, are awful. Endless sub clauses roam across prairies of newsprint in search of the point, like homesteader wagons on the Oregon Trail circling around a knackered old buffalo. And yet, the daily American way with language is touched with brilliance, taut and crackling with life. My favourite example is the simplest the old railway crossing sign that says simply stop. Look, Listen. Impossible to shorten or clarify the it was written by an engineer for a country of new immigrants with limited English. It's not long, but it's still in use today, a rare example of perfect writing. And American manners, too, are not quite what you might expect. The invocation to have a nice day is still common, and when it feels sincere, it has real charm. But Like a fast food franchise, it has expanded and mutated in the Bible Belt. You will be wished a blessed day. For example, gymnasium receptionists will enjoin you to have an excellent workout. And most improbably of all, I have been handed a ticket to a multi storey car park with the exhortation to have an outstanding parking experience. In some ways, in my three years in America, I found the country at one of the least typical moments in its history. A society defined by boundless optimism in its own future has been suffering a spasm of self doubt. For the first time in history. The current generation of Americans can't be certain that the generation that comes next will be more prosperous. An aversion to paying taxes and an addiction to public and private debt in the end can't add up, and American voters may well be left to conclude that they have awarded themselves a lifestyle that they can't really afford. One possible casualty might be the curious form of credit card imperialism which has helped to shape the world in recent years. America has enormous debts, but it still spends as much money on defence as all the rest of the world put together. And if that makes you uncomfortable, by the way, it's worth remembering that wherever on earth you hear this, there's a good chance that if you're ever invaded, your President's first phone call will be to the White House in Washington. And so this remains a place of immense patriotic pride. Because it is a country at war. Young men and women in uniform are still a common sight on internal flights around the country. It's curiously moving to see them sitting, looking a little embarrassed as a pilot or flight attendant calls on their fellow passengers to give their service and their sacrifice a standing ovation. But there are, of course, irritations to living anywhere, and it's the job of the irritable to find them. Americans could make their public spaces a little quieter, for example, if they all took one step closer to the person they are talking to. And they could speed up their journeys to work by not insisting on holding every elevator for everyone who wants to catch it as though it was one of the last helicopters leaving the roof of the Saigon embassy in 1975. There will be another lift along in a minute, and after three years of eating steaks the size of elephants, ears off plates bigger than satellite dishes, all of our crockery back in Europe now looks like it was borrowed from a doll's house. That may take some getting used to, but America in one sense was exactly as I expected it to be, a place of gripping public theatre at election times, and a place of private virtue nearly all the time. I found that on the night I first arrived three years ago, on a much delayed New Year's Eve flight which slipped and stumbled through the icy skies over the choppy darkness of the cold prairie, I chatted sporadically to the grandmotherly woman beside me about home and family, although I can't in truth remember much of what was said. But I do remember what happened once we landed. There were no taxis, and my fellow passenger insisted, without checking with him, that her husband would happily drive me to my hotel, a round trip for him in the Arctic midnight of a public holiday of perhaps two or three hours. I expected to detect at least a flicker of surprise on his face when this was first put to him, but there was none. This is America, son, he told me. We help each other out. Nothing that happened in the three years that followed was to undermine that first impression of friendliness and hospitality, even if it's hardly in the usual spirit of this programme to have drawn your final conclusions about a country three minutes after your plane lands. De Tocqueville toiled on higher slopes of creativity than me and did a pretty good job of understanding and explaining Americans, even though they get riled at the idea that foreigners can ever understand or explain them. Still, for all his tireless labours and his exalted musings, I bet nothing ever happened to him which explained as clearly as that five minute conversation in an airport car park three years ago, exactly what it's like to live among that extraordinary people in that extraordinary place.
- [12:20]
D
And that was Kevin Connolly. This week saw the reopening of the Our lady of Africa Cathedral in Algiers after five years of renovations. The church was built in the late 19th century by the French who colonized Algeria and stayed there until independence in 1962. Chloe Arnold, who attended the inauguration ceremony, says that to the people of Algeria, the cathedral is more than just a religion symbol.
- [12:48]
E
For a country whose population is more than 99% Muslim, Algeria's Roman Catholic cathedral had attracted an enormous crowd. The usually tranquil veranda in front of the church was swarming with cars and people, and traffic snaked back all the way down the hairpin bends which you must climb to reach the cliff on which it stands above the Bay of Algiers. For the last five years, Notre Dame d', Afrique, Our lady of Africa, has stood shrouded in scaffolding as workmen carried out restoration work. The once beautiful building had fallen into disrepair, its foundations crumbling, and perhaps saddest of all the statue of the Virgin Mary which stands above the portico had lost one of her arms. But on Monday, the piles of rubble had been cleared and the cathedral stood resplendent once more, its white sandstone walls rising to the clouds and the statue of the Virgin stretching both arms out towards the sea. As cathedrals go, Our lady of Africa is magnificent. The French architect who designed it back in the 1880s, Jean Eugene Fromageau, gave it a Moorish touch, a nod to its location in North Africa, adding blue mosaic tiles, though it's supposed to be a sister to Marseille's Notre Dame de la Garde, on the other side of the Mediterranean. So who were all these people flocking to a Catholic church in this largely Islamic country? Many were Muslims, not all. There were sub Saharan Africans, some of them students, like my friend Immaculate from Uganda, who's studying medicine at Algiers University. She enjoys it, she says, but studying in a Muslim country, she's not allowed to touch dead bodies, so she doesn't feel she's getting as much practical experience as she should. There were Christians from the expatriate community here, French, Germans and Italians. And there were descendants of the Pied Noire, the French settlers who worked in the cities and ran farms and vineyards on the fertile strip of land above the Sahara Desert that runs from Morocco to Tunisia. One of these is Dinnie Gonzalez, an elderly gentleman dressed in his Sunday best, his snow white hair combed neatly over the top of his head. He stepped outside the cathedral for a moment, for some air. I was born and bred in Algeria, he tells me, smiling proudly. Just like my parents and grandparents before me. He says he's been coming to Our lady since before independence in 1962. It's always stood as a symbol of Algiers, he adds, not just a symbol of a faith. Often, he tells me, Muslims come to the church to light candles. It's a place which has brought greater tolerance among the different communities here, he says, choosing his words carefully. It's a place that transcends politics, that lets us live in a society with more justice, more brotherhood. In some ways, it's a miracle this cathedral can operate in a country with such a troubled recent history. Algeria is emerging from two decades of violence, what they call here les Anais Noir, or the black years, when hundreds of thousands of people were killed in fighting between Islamist militants and government forces. In those dark days, the being foreign or practicing a different religion could have cost you your life. Back at the cathedral, the ceremony is ending, and the organ begins to play. The congregation spills down the steps and onto the terrace. Among them is the wali, or governor, of Algiers, the minister for religious affairs, and Abdulaziz Bel Khadim, the country's last prime minister, a measure of how much the cathedral's reopening has gone beyond religious boundaries. In one far corner, where the ground slopes steeply down to the sea, past an old French cemetery, in a football stadium, two men are standing smoking cigarettes. They're drivers waiting for their employers to emerge. I ask one of them, Mehti Helelshi, a Muslim, of course, what he makes of the grand reopening. She's very beautiful, he says. They've done a great job restoring her. We're so proud of her. As I leave the cathedral, I look up at the original words inscribed in blue and gold above the altar. They read notre Dame d' Afrique Prix et pour nous et pour les Mussulman. Our lady of Africa, pray for us and for the Muslims. And then, sitting at a pew at the back of the church, I notice a woman saying a prayer. She's wearing a chador, one of the traditional head coverings for Algerian Muslim women.
- [17:19]
D
Chloe Arnold In Algiers, there were heartwarming scenes at Old Trafford on Monday evening. Some of the Chilean miners rescued from deep underground in October came to meet Bobby Charlton and watch Manchester United's game against Arsenal. For Chileans back home, it was just another in a series of extraordinary events in what has been an unprecedented roller coaster year. And Gideon Long, our man in Santiago, says that for the country's new leader, Sebastian Pineira, this bison year has been something of a baptism of fire.
- [17:52]
A
It all started before Mr. Pineiera had even taken office, in the early hours of February 27, when Chileans were shaken from their beds by one of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded. With a magnitude of 8.8, it killed nearly 500 people, destroyed thousands of homes, and unleashed deadly tsunamis. Many towns and villages are still struggling to recover. I remember driving through the seaside town of Ilocha a few days after the quake. The scene was apocalyptic. Wooden houses had been reduced to piles of sticks in the sand. People were camping in the hills, too afraid to come back down to sea level. On the beach, there had been a circus. The waves had ripped it apart, and the blue and orange canvas of the Big Top was littered across the sand. As I surveyed the wreckage, a man in blue overalls wandered down the beach, picking through the debris. His name was Fernando Monsalves, and he was the circus owner. It had been his life for 45 years. Just as it had been for his father before him. My father was a circus clown, he told me. When he died, they painted his face in clown's makeup and they buried him like that out of respect for him and for his profession. I've always lived in the circus, and I'm going to die in the circus, too. I won't let these acts of God kill me. If Mr. Pineiera needed a reminder of the daunting forces of nature conspiring against his country, it came on March 11, when he took the presidential oath. As he arrived at the Congress Building in Valparaiso, an ominous aftershock rippled through the city. The building's giant chandeliers swayed disturbingly, watched from below by a bevy of Latin American dignitaries, some of whom looked truly terrified. Mr. Pineiera kept cool and pressed on, but he must surely have felt like a marked man. Three months later, Chileans received a welcome respite when their football team went to the World cup for the first time in 12 years. Their defeat by Brazil in the second round was one of the few truly predictable events of Chile's 2010. Then came the miners. On August 5, the roof caved in at the San Jose mine in the Atacama desert, and for 17 days, nothing was heard from the 33 men trapped below ground. I, for one, had given them up for dead. Then, on that extraordinary Sunday, 22nd August, a drilling team broke through to the chamber where the men were. When the engineers pulled the drill up to the surface, there was a note attached to it. We are all well in the shelter. The 33, it read. And from then on, the miners rescue captivated the world. And there were other headlines, too. Chile celebrated 200 years of independence. And on December 8, a fire started by inmates spread through a jail in Santiago, killing 81 prisoners. It was the worst disaster in the history of Chile's penitentiary system. So how have Chileans reacted to these events? Well, for starters, there's been a tremendous outpouring of patriotism. Never before have I seen so many Chilean flags everywhere. That's partly pride, particularly over the way the miners were rescued, but it's also to do with solidarity in the face of adversity. And Chileans have, on the whole, come together and helped each other out. I think the other consequence of this remarkable year is that it's lifted the lid on the reality of life here. It's prompted people to make a more honest assessment of their country. For too long, Chileans have patted themselves on the back for living in the most successful nation in Latin America, the richest, safest country in the region, where things work and where you can't bribe the police. But the events of 2010 have shown that that's not the entire story. Yes, it's true that Chile has a formidable mining industry, but it's also true that that industry is sometimes built on Third World labor practices like those at the San Jose mine. Yes, it's true that crime rates are low here compared to elsewhere in the region. But those who do commit crimes are are locked up in overcrowded and inhumane prisons like the one where the fire broke out. Mr. Pineiera has promised to address these shortfalls, but that's all for 2011. For now, I get the impression that most Chileans just want to see the back of this year. In Santiago, the streets are carpeted in brilliant purple jacaranda blossoms, a sure sign that spring is giving way to summer. Chileans are preparing to do what they always do in January and February head to the beach for a spot of sunshine, some time with the family, and above all, for a well earned rest.
- [22:55]
D
Gideon Long in Santiago Colombia is well known as the world's largest producer of cocaine. Less well known is the fact that it's no longer the biggest exporter of the drug. It's been overtaken by Peru. And that's because Britain, the US and the Colombian government have stepped up their efforts to tackle the problem. At source Frank Gardner's been to a remote jungle laboratory to see firsthand how the counternarcotics police, the anti narcoticos, go about their business.
- [23:25]
C
Dawn on the rain lashed Runway of the police air base just outside bogota. Tiny turboprop 8 seaters are taxiing down the Runway and taking off into the clouds, dark and pregnant with more rain. A state of emergency has been declared over much of the country now suffering from its worst floods in 42 years. But for Colombia's war on drugs, there is no let up here. The police have their own aviation wing, a sort of miniature air force to get them around the country, and they've offered to show me their operations on their fractious southern border with Ecuador. Our pilot appears jet black hair glistening with gel wrap around sunglasses and leather bomber jacket. Vamos, he says. Let's go. With a rasping buzz, we rattle down the Runway, my head touching the ceiling in the back of the small plane lifting clear of the flooded plateau that surrounds the Andean capital. We put down briefly to refuel in Calais, infamous in the 90s for its now defunct coke cartel. Then, with a surge of horsepower we're airborne once more, flying over red tiled farmhouses and meandering river bends, then ever more lush jungle, finally coming in low over the Pacific Ocean city of Tumaco. This is the last port on the Colombian coast before the border with Ecuador, and not surprisingly, it's a major export route for cocaine heading north to Mexico in the us A convoy of police jeeps is there to meet us and we rattle into town past a wooden shanty town with rows of washing and an unsmiling population. The police are not popular here. Most of the locals on this coast are black Afro Colombians with very low incomes, so the imported Latino police stationed here look almost like an army of occupation. We pull up at a seaside building marked Hotel, guarded by a paramilitary policeman with bush hat and assault rifle. It's a police base and incidentally, the the first time I've ever been inside a hotel that has its own armory dispensing everything from M16s to grenade discharges. We're summoned to a briefing by the Major in charge of all counter narcotics operations for Tumaco. This province, he tells us, has the highest concentration of illegal coca plantations in the whole country. We are fighting insurgents and we are fighting drug traffickers. They are one and the same. They are using homemade mortars, mines and booby traps against us. I must be looking uneasy at this point because the Major reads my mind. Don't worry, he says in his heavily accented English. I'm going to take you to a safe plantation we have seized and cleared. Well, that's a relief. Then one hour later and the sweat is pouring off me and I'm not even doing the work. Several policemen in jungle green fatigues are helping me propel myself and my wheelchair through the mud and swamp. Their assault rifles keep banging into my spine, but it seems churlish to complain. The foliage closes in on all sides and we send up clouds of mosquitoes, carriers of dengue fever. They descend on us in droves, only slightly deterred by a slab of some sticky repellent that the police are passing round. And then suddenly they vanish as we burst into a clearing full of bright green cocoa bushes, the linchpin of the global multi billion dollar cocaine trade. A makeshift jungle laboratory sits in the shade with its chemicals, its powders and its half pulped leaves. The police place explosive charges. We move back a safe distance and the whole lab goes up in smoke. Someone's quota will be down this week, but we all know that this one operation is far too small to hurt the traffickers. We leave Tumaka the next day, just as we arrived in a police aircraft. But this time it's a World War II vintage Dakota with some minor upgrades. This is without doubt the most uncomfortable flight I have ever taken. Minutes after take off we hit turbulence and I realize with a smile that while my wheelchair is strapped down to the metal floor of the fuselage, I am not actually strapped down to my wheelchair. So with each swoop and drop I grip the rims of my wheels to avoid taking off myself. At 8,000 metres up, with no pressure in the cabin, the oxygen masks and the sick bags are out. The rest of my team and I exchange glances. It's also very cold and the police have broken out a store of camouflage quilts. But eventually we land on the rain slick Runway and the propellers stutter to a halt. Unpleasant as it was, this was of course only a glimpse into the world of the anti narcoticos. A peep into their daily grind of dodgy flights, malarial jungle patrols and mine strewn coca fields. I'm grateful for the insight, but to be honest, I'm deeply relieved to be going home.
- [27:58]
D
Frank Gardner, dumped from the steamy jungles of South America into the white hell of a British winter. And that's it. We'll have a special edition of the programme at the end of the year. Until then, goodbye.