← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Dec 4, 2010
00:28:14
The great silence that is the legacy of genocide -- Neil Trevithick considers the of...
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Transcript13 lines
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Hi, this is Alan Johnston.
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We make two editions of from our own correspondent. If you'd like to hear the version I introduce on the BBC World Service, you can find it by going to the BBC iplayer. But here's the one broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's presented by Kate Ady.
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A land of secrets. The Cambodians who live amongst their parents killers and don't even know it after 20 years of anarchy, hope for a new start in Somalia there are even plans to introduce cricket. Also today, the soaring price of tomatoes in Egypt is it exercising the voters ahead of tomorrow's election? And as the deep freeze continues here, we're off to the shores of Lake Assal in Djibouti. It's one of the hottest places on earth. Few countries live with a darker past than Cambodia. More than a million Cambodians died from starvation, disease or execution during the killing fields years of the late 70s. Only now are those responsible being brought to justice. One, a prison warder, was found guilty in the summer. Other leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime are expected to go on trial next year. Neil Trevithick's been making a programme in Cambodia and trying to discover if its people are finally coming to terms with their history. He's finding that many are reluctant even to talk about it.
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The psychologist had agreed to be interviewed before I arrived in Phnom Penh. But when we get to his clean, air conditioned office beside a main road on the way out of the city where the greening fields begin, there seems to be a problem. A long, urgent discussion in Khmer ensues with our translator Gunty. Ok, he'll talk, but only in English and his name must not be used. Why in English, I think, but then drop it. Replies to questions about his work with victims and perpetrators, as they're called here of the Khmer rouge period some 30 years ago are haunted. And I need a better feel for the internalised voices that are part of what I think of as the great silence here. Older people just don't talk about the past and their mantra to the young is that staying silent is always a solution if there's a problem. What used to be a survival strategy for them as children in a time of unimaginable brutality has become almost a national characteristic. A generation or two on, I rack my brains for a question that will bring our interviewee out of himself. Can you tell us, I ask finally, what it's like inside the head of a perpetrator and inside the head of a victim? Now, today, can you just be them for me? I hold out my arm towards him, beginning the classic radio producer's torture of aching extended arm with increasingly heavy microphone. At the end, we've turned off the air conditioning because of the noise. Sweat trickles in rivulets down my back. He lowers his eyes and begins to speak softly and slowly in English, as a victim. First I can smile at you, he says, but I don't know. One day you can kill me. Or when you kill me and you escape, you can be safe. You can just run away into another far off province. And then, in the role of perpetrator, he says, I will try to hide my identity as much as possible. I will not try to talk about what I have done because I don't trust you. I want to tell the truth. I am not happy about the past, but I have no choice. I know I killed your father, but you don't know. You were small. I tried to be as distant as possible in the relationship. The psychologist talks methodically for about 15 minutes and everything slows as he paints a picture of a country of small villages in which an entire society is distorted by the tragedies and atrocities of the past, where everybody knows things that can't be said, where one businessman doesn't deal with another because he was a killer, where victims killed too. Sometimes it was simply necessary for survival. Today, children who lost both parents live amongst their parents. Killers. Secrets are everywhere. Knowledge of where bodies were buried, who buried them, who did what to whom. This is a country I feel crisscrossed by invisible threads, the paths that people walk to avoid their history. A psychologist concludes by saying, all we can do is try not to get closer. And then he simply stays silent, eyes cast down, hands in his lap. If I hadn't taken the battery out of his wall clock before we began the interview, you'd just have heard the clock ticking. We walked out into the humid heat in silence. Later, I discover the reason the psychologist speaks in English is because the authorities don't really censor what's said in English. And that's because, as the editor of the English language version of the Phnom Penh post says to me somewhat ruefully, they know that hardly any Cambodians will read or hear it. Time and again, I'm told we don't have a culture of reading in this country, which actually means we killed everyone who could read. This is old news. Information about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge is in the open. Comrade Duch, who ran the S21 prison, has been found guilty and there are four more Khmer leaders in prison just down the road from here. Later that night, rain pounds fiercely on the wide leaves of the palms outside my window and lightning flashes perilously close to the stupor of the Buddhist temple next door. I'm trying to write up my notes about the psychologist, but somehow it all seems pointless. There are backpackers here, young travellers, holiday brochures in which Cambodia is billed as an enthralling destination, eulogizing the warm, enigmatic people, foreign investors, NGO workers, diplomats. There are tours, temples, mountains, wonderful beaches. And all of this just seems to skate over the top of the enigmatic Cambodians who walk their invisible paths.
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That was Neil Trevithick. The United nations has launched a multi million pound appeal to fund aid projects in Somalia. The ongoing situation there, it says, is a humanitarian catastrophe. Its capital, Mogadishu, is one of the most fought over, most battered, most dangerous cities in the world. The BBC recently managed to conduct a poll there which discovered that the despite ongoing fighting, its residents were surprisingly optimistic about their future. Andrew Harding's been trying to find out if their hopes of peace and stability are realistic.
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I was expecting the sniper fire and the mortars and the familiar spider of nerves that wriggles in your gut when you drive through the rubble of a city like Mogadishu and wonder quite how fiercely your guards will fight to protect you from the kidnappers. What I wasn't expecting was the snorkelling. I've just spent a week here in Somalia, in a heavily fortified military compound on the edge of the capital, within earshot of the endless gunfire and beside a long, scruffy, stunning beach After a hot day jumping in and out of armoured cars in a flak jacket, there's nothing like a giant rock pool and a few playful starfish to restore order. The compound is busy these days and expanding fast. The airports being tidied up, foreign contractors coming in to help with security and communications, and a great deal of building work. It's not quite the Green Zone in Baghdad, but there's a community evolving here, complete with barbecues and fishing trips and ambitious plans for a cricket net and bowling machine. It's all sustained by the belief, or at least the hope, that after 20 years of anarchy, Somalia might just be on the brink of real change. Believe me, I'm sceptical too. I covered my first Somali peace process a decade ago. They tend to have a rather short shelf life, but Dr. Marian Qasim assures me this time it will be different. I have been given a lift in an armoured convoy to Villa Somalia Another heavily defended compound, this one in the bullet riddled ruins of the city centre. Birds chirping in the trees outside, mortars and machine gun fire. Now, just a few blocks away, a badly lit room is full of members of Somalia's huge diaspora. Academics, businessmen, civil servants, many fresh from the airport. I can hear a slight twang of American and from Dr. Marian, just a hint of a Birmingham accent. She spent 20 years as an English primary school teacher. Then last week, abruptly, she got on a plane to come home. This is a turning point, she says with conviction. After two decades of war, people have had enough. Now I have to make a sacrifice. A new Western backed government, barely in control of half the city, has asked her to become its new Minister for Women's Affairs. It will be, she concedes, a challenge. Her family back in snowy England have told her she's mad. In the past, ministers like Dr. Maryan would spend most of their time in neighbouring Kenya for security reasons. Successive administrations hanging out in Nairobi hotels, bickering and plotting, it said, how to steal Western donors funds. But that's supposed to be changing. Now I run into the government's head of protocol, a tall, tired looking man who has come home after years in London. No more trips to Nairobi now, he declares. We all share rooms in a hotel here. We work 18 hours a day. Sometimes there aren't enough beds. The government's plan is to bring a little order to Mogadishu, win public support, reach out to rival clan militias and with the help of some African Union soldiers, start to reclaim the country from the militant Islamic Islamic group Al Shabaab. I'd like to tell you how I have wandered the streets of the city discussing the plan with local people, but it's a little dangerous for that. There's talk of a huge cash reward from Al Shabaab for anyone who can capture someone foreign like me. Still, I've managed to talk to quite a few residents, but almost all are too scared to give their names. There's an oddly cheerful lady I met at a hospital who said she lived like a wild animal in a burrow, only coming out between gun battles to hunt for food. There's a journalist I've met on previous trips who lives in territory controlled by Al Shabaab. Too dangerous to write now, he says, miming someone sawing off his arm. He's taken his seven year old daughter out of school after she came home one day and told him they'd been taught how to use pistols in class. The world needs to understand, he says, how dangerous Al Shabaab really are. The armored convoy heads back towards the military compound on the left. A bright streak of blue ocean jumps out from the rubble. A tank barrel pokes through a ruined shop front. Gunmen in flip flops loll in the back of a pickup truck. A few more shots crackle overhead, but the streets are full of markets, too, and groups of old men sipping tea in the shade. I remember the new foreign minister telling me of what he calls Mogadishu's subterranean iceberg of normality. And there's the presidential advisor who declares that today Mogadishu is a city of death, but tomorrow, with a little luck, just a city of checkpoints.
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Andrew Harding, who's now back at his base in Johannesburg. There's a second round of voting in Egypt's general election tomorrow, but the two main opposition groups say they won't be taking part. One of them, the Muslim Brotherhood, which feels candidates as independents because of a ban on religious parties, says the first round was rigged and invalid. The other, Al Waft, talks of fraud and thuggery. President Mubarak's National Democratic party, which took 95% of the seats in the first round, now seems set for an overwhelming victory when tomorrow's votes are counted. Our Cairo correspondent, John Lyne, has been reflecting on the nature of politics Egyptian style.
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It's all about the price of a box of tomatoes, or at least that's what you would expect in any normal election in Egypt. They've got so expensive recently that a newspaper cartoon showed a suitor arriving at the young lady's house with a box of tomatoes on his head. Her parents are looking down from the upstairs window. Spotting the much prized tomatoes, they remark what a good catch he'd make for their daughter. Nobody knows precisely why tomatoes have got quite so dear recently, but you get some idea as you follow one of the battered old trucks taking them to market. The tomatoes are piled high on the back in wicker crates, a few bouncing off on the road as the vehicle lurches over the bumps. According to one of Egypt's most successful farmers, 50% of all tomatoes are spoiled before they even get to the shops. Like so many of Egypt's problems, on the face of it, the solution is very simple. Get better organized, perhaps find a willing aid donor to give some refrigerated trucks to enable the tomatoes to get to market in one piece. But the more you dig, the more complicated it gets. What about the whole system of agriculture, in which the average farm is now down to less than the size of one Football field. Like everything in Egypt, it's a Gordian knot in which every problem is entangled with another. With ordinary people complaining about such a basic issue as the price of food, you might think that the government would have suffered in the parliamentary elections. But instead, after the first round last weekend, official media trumpeted a sweeping victory for the ruling party of President Mubarak. How to explain it? There's certainly plenty of evidence of electoral fraud. Outside the first polling station I arrived at, a candidate was busily distributing free food. Watch out. Put it away. There are cameras here. We heard someone say there are pictures on the Internet that look suspiciously like ballot boxes being stuffed. After the two main opposition groups won virtually no seats in the first round, they blamed such abuses and decided to boycott the second round of voting this weekend. But it's more than that. An experienced newspaper editor, no friend of the government, said he believed the ruling party would probably have won anyway, even without fraud. On election day, albeit with a less sweeping victory on the campaign trail with the opposition candidate, Gamila Ismail, I began to understand why. In a poor neighbourhood of Cairo, she's confronted by local people who shout at her to go away. Their mp, a member of the ruling party, has given them water, help with building, repairs, even boxes of food. In the holy month of Ramadan, they say, why do they need the opposition? And indeed, Gamila Ismail proudly declares that she has no such goodies to offer. Some of that is what governments and MPs can and should do, providing services for their constituents. A lot more of it verges on patronage or sheer corruption. Closer and closer to the election, it got more and more blatant, with ample evidence of vote buying, the price of a vote reportedly increasing by the hour. It's not just the governing party that's been accused of such practices. There are suspicions about some of the opposition parties as well. But candidates for the ruling party are better placed to deliver. Still, you might think that the opposition's message that everything is rotten and needs to be changed might resonate, especially in this dirt poor neighbourhood where the rubbish is strewn on the streets and there's not even a proper path between the ramshackle houses. But the Egyptian government knows its people well. A wise old head from the ruling party was talking to me about the recent attempt to bomb cargo planes using packages from Yemen. The fear generated might do no harm to the political prospects of President Obama, he suggested, just as President Bush had benefited from the politics of fear. That got me thinking. The Egyptian government has discovered an even more potent weapon than hopelessness. If you can convince your people that nothing will change whoever you vote for, then why bother? Rather than choosing the candidate with some unbelievable promise of a better future, a sensible Egyptian might be a better place to go for a slightly more short term benefit, why not vote for the candidate who offers a little cash in hand? Or perhaps even the promise of a box of tomatoes.
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John Lyne in Cairo it's been more than seven months since an explosion aboard BP's Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers and sent millions of gallons of crude oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. The spill was described as America's greatest environmental catastrophe ever. It caused extensive damage to marine and wildlife habitats and to the Gulf's fishing and tourism industries. Since the leak was plugged, the world's attention has moved on to other matters. But Paul Adams, who's just been to the southern tip of Louisiana, has been finding out that for some of those who live and work on the Gulf coast, forgetting and moving on is not so easy.
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We were fishing at the end of the world. Or at least a place that felt like it. Grand Isle is one of the final precarious fragments of land as the myriad bayous of the Mississippi Delta give way to the open water of the Gulf of Mexico. Around us, hungry frigate birds watched as we headed for the oyster beds. Pelicans swooped by in formation, low and effortless, and a pair of dolphins raced just ahead of the bow, daring each other to get closer and occasionally rolling sideways to check. We were suitably impressed. We were less than 100 miles from the wreck of the deep water horizon, but everything looked pristine under a blazing sun and the oysters big as the palm of my hand, succulent and briny. It was still early, and so for the first time in my life, I had oysters for breakfast, but the atmosphere aboard the boat was sombre. The oysters were good, but hardly plentiful at this, the season of peak demand. Far too many were simply dead not, as you might think, coated in sticky oil or even poisoned by chemical dispersants, but killed off, as luck would have it, by fresh water, millions of gallons from the Mississippi river hurriedly diverted into the bays and marshes of the delta to keep the oil from rolling in earlier in the year, upsetting the delicate balance of fresh and salty conditions the oysters need to survive. Nick Collins is a fourth generation oysterman with a rich gumbo of an accent to match. His business had only just recovered from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina five years earlier, and Nick was looking forward to a bumper year. But if the first setback was an act of God, the second was an act of industry. An industry that is much bigger and more commercially important to Louisiana than Nick's Delicious Oysters. An industry that sits off this fragile, mysterious landscape of channels and marshes and produces the stuff that Americans will really can't get enough of. At nearby Port Fouchon beach, the shallow water rigs, tens of them, sit as little as a mile offshore. Oil arrived here in the weeks after the spill, and BP's cleanup continues. Armies of contract workers, mostly from Central America, make their steady, painstaking way along the sand, wave after wave in bright yellow boots, stooping slightly over shovels and brushes, scooping up tiny tarballs covered in sand. They pause, scour the patch in front of them, and then, to the sound of vamonos, let's go. Move on a few paces. Not all the oil is from the Macondo well. Studies show that some of it comes from elsewhere, perhaps from the rigs we can see, perhaps even from the natural seepage that goes on all the time in the oil rich Gulf of Mexico and which has over the eons, created an army of microbes that like nothing more than to feast, like pac men, on energy rich hydrocarbons, organisms that just might clean up whatever muck lurks out of sight all by themselves. So the cleanup is not just about the deep water horizon, but about every company that's ever sought to make a fortune extracting the black stuff and bringing it ashore. Bp, it seems, is making amends for all of us. But back to the oysters and another family business struggling with the fallout. The on the edge of New Orleans, legendary French Quarter P and J Oyster Company has been in business for more than 130 years. Like Nick Collins, Al Sunseri wonders if he has what it takes to recover the ice, which gushes noisily into his giant coolers every eight minutes, has very little to cool, and the high whitewashed stone shucking tables are deserted. He's laid off all but two temporary workers who keep a trickle of customers happy with oysters from nearby Texas. Al also had to deal with Katrina downsizing and waiting for the oyster beds to replenish themselves, confident as everyone was that it was just a matter of time before the oysters reappeared and everyone was happy again. But now he wonders about his son, who's experienced depression and hasn't been working for a couple of months. He says he remembers his own anxiety as a young man taking over a business with such a long tradition to uphold. He thinks, too, about Alaska and the herrings that disappeared from Prince William Sound three years after the Exxon Valdez spill, never to return. More than seven months after the blowout on the deep water horizon, the full ramifications of this disaster are still hard to gauge. The uncertainty gnaws at everyone who depends on the sea. Is it possible, they wonder, that the worst days may still lie ahead?
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Paul Adams in Louisiana in this week of freezing temperatures and creaking infrastructure, many will have allowed themselves a brief dream of being somewhere a little bit hotter. Well, while we've been walking around, cursing public transport and looking like Michelin men, my colleague Pascal Harte has been to Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. It's one of the hottest places on Earth, but life there, she tells us, has nothing to do with loungers by the pool, swaying palms and frosted cocktails. And you may not be surprised to hear it's the poor who find it hardest to coast.
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One moment the porter was there, dressed in grimy blue overalls. The next he was off, the only sign of him a pair of dusty sandals discarded in the airport car park. He seized our equipment before his colleagues got a chance and presumably slipped off his shoes to run better. When I finally catch up with him, loading our luggage onto the security scanner, I remember I've run out of cash. Embarrassed, I I Gingerly offer him 3 liter bottles of water. To my surprise, he says, merci, and then he turns back again and says, c' est bien, gentil, as though he's just received a particularly thoughtful present. In nearly 10 years of working for the BBC around the world, mostly in Africa, I have never before been able to pay someone with water. Not in Warthorn, Congo, where the rivers and lakes are contaminated with bilharzia, nor in the dry desert of Mauritania. But Djibouti is one of the poorest countries in the world in terms of fresh water, and it's hard to imagine somewhere you'd need it more. This is one of the hottest places on the planet, Lake Assal, in the center of the country. In summer, the temperature here routinely reaches 55 degrees Celsius, but it's winter now in Djibouti, and it's a mere 34. That might not seem too extreme, but I can tell you this is a different sort of hot it quickly becomes unbearable. An oven, like wind, batters you constantly. It's so strong it snatches words out of your mouth so that you can't hear what someone standing right next to you is saying while it carries every word of a conversation going on 50 metres away, if it's upwind now on holiday with a sun umbrella, some iced water and a cool sea, 34 degrees Celsius might be bliss. Here there is no natural shade and no drinking water at all. Les Casale is as warm as a bath and saltier than the sea. I weighed in just a bit. When the rubber soles of my shoes have got too hot to stand on, the water dries in seconds, and I note the hem of my navy blue trousers is as stiff as a board and completely white with salt. The people who live at Lake Assal never swim in it. Ali Hamid, who mines the salt by hand where it forms along the shore, tells me they want to. The noise of the green water lapping is alluring, and the salt crystals look as cool as ice. But the salt drying on your skin in the searing sun makes you itchy to the point of pain, and fresh water is far too precious to waste washing it off. Ali's family, all 10 of them, depend on a government tanker delivering water once a week. Wealthy people living in Djibouti town can buy the shade and water they need, so the heat is a mere inconvenience. At Lake Assal, people are so poor, they have no choice but to let the extreme temperature govern every aspect of their lives, or they won't survive. Ali's house is made of chicken wire and corrugated iron. This doesn't keep out the heat or the wind. Some bone dry palm fronds have been carefully threaded through the chicken wire in places to provide shade. They must have come from some distance away. The only trees anywhere near Lake Esale have thorns, not leaves. There is a man who has built a wall well, four pillars and a roof. It's a valuable asset. At Le Casal, we pay him just to eat our own sandwiches in his shade. The heat dictates when people hear work, when they sleep, how quickly they move and how slowly they talk. Patience, everyone tells us, is what you need to live here. What does constant thirst feel like? I ask Ali. You see how slowly I speak, he says, and how softly. And it's true. Everyone we meet here speaks with a hoarse voice. As Djibouti's population doubles over the next 15 years, the government will find it harder and harder to keep delivering any drinking water at all to families like Ali's. And he won't be able to buy it from a private company. The price for the salt he mines is falling. Early one morning, we meet a man by the road, who's selling toy cars carved out of the volcanic rock. Like Ali, Mohammed says he's pinning his hopes for the future of Lake Assal on tourists coming to look at it. The first plush hotel has sprung up in Djibouti. It has two swimming pools and hot and cold running water. But the water still smells of desalination chemicals and tastes of salt. Its guests are mostly foreign military on R and R, visiting diplomats and NGO staff. I ask Ali why he and other families don't leave and look for work in Djibouti town. We were born here. We love Lake Assal. We like the heat. We just want more water.
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Pascal Harter in Sun Blasted Djibouti, bringing this edition to a close. I'll be back again next week with more from our own correspondence to join us. Goodbye.