← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Breaking the Rules
00:28:13
Correspondents' stories: the Champs d'Elysees is an icon of Paris, a majestic piece of...
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Hello from the. From our own correspondence studios at Broadcasting
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House in London, you've downloaded the latest
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edition of the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
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It's introduced by Kate Ady Today.
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Assassinations, abductions, explosions. The world may no longer be paying attention, but the revolution in Libya is far from over. There's growing foreboding in Central Asia. What will happen when NATO troops pull out of Afghanistan? The reporter who broke the rules and handed over money so a baby could eat. And the Paris boulevard once dubbed the most beautiful in the world. Our correspondent says, don't go there. It's crass, styleless, expensive and naff. There's been plenty more evidence this week that Libya is still struggling with the lawlessness that's plagued it since the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011. Yesterday, a car bomb exploded outside the Swedish Consulate in Benghazi. Earlier, the country's Prime Minister, Ali Zadan, was seized by gunmen in the centre of the capital, Tripoli. He was later released unharmed, saying his abduction was part of an attempted coup. Tim Whewell's been telling us how it all reminds him of another conflict, long ago and far away in 1900, at
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the height of the Boer War. My grandmother was 13, and one of her favourite memories later in life was of watching her mother, a no nonsense Lancashire barmaid, berate a hapless young newspaper vendor on a street corner who was innocently trying to shift a hundred copies of the Oldham Evening Chronicle with the latest on the British advance in South Africa. Relief of Ladysmith. Relief of Ladysmith. Menacingly, she jabbed at the boy with her umbrella and demanded, who is this blooming Lady Smith anyway? And why the heck should I care if she's relieved? I thought of that story often two years ago, as the current cream of foreign correspondence and me reported on another sensational yet ephemeral chain of victories at the other extremity of the African continent, along the desolate desert road that runs hundreds of miles along Libya's coast. The unglamorous face of the Med teenage boys having better things to do nowadays than sell newspapers. It was that strap line at the bottom of our TV screens that shouted, Capture of Rassa Newf rebels. Take Binjawad. Rasul Anouf bin Jawad. In normal times, a camel wouldn't stop long in those baking villages. And they haven't seen many journalists either, since Colonel Gaddafi was killed further up the road. But this week, Libya became a headline again when the Prime Minister was briefly kidnapped by a militia. Of course, the militias never went away. They're the Same rebels who fought Gaddafi two years ago, who now threaten the very government they replaced him with. They regularly besiege ministries in pursuit of various demands around Rasulanuf. For the last two months, they've been blockading oil terminals, depriving their own country of $130 million revenue a day. Their aim this time, to win home rule and the lion's share of the oil wealth for their eastern region, Cyrenaica. Every time I meet a militia man, I ask what he did before the war. The kindly looking, white bearded commander who's locked down one of the terminals used to buy and sell cars. So why doesn't he go back to that? It paid better. I can't put down my gun, he says, when our revolution's in danger. But who's the revolution in danger from? Many think it's the militias themselves. Benghazi, the capital of Cyrenaica, the cradle of the revolution, is now a city of uncertainty and fear. Popular protest forced the militias to close their bases there after they were accused of involvement in the attack on the US consulate in which the ambassador died. But their gunmen haven't gone away and no state authority has moved in to take control. Almost daily there are assassinations. Police stations are blown up. A young doctor I got to know two years ago, passionate then about the prospects for the new rebirth, is now moving to Canada, one of many leaving the country. He says armed gangs terrorise the hospitals. A colleague was stabbed in the thigh for supposedly giving inadequate care. A gunman burst into an operating theatre and shot the patient in the head as he lay on the table. Meanwhile, the former spokeswoman of the first rebel government tells me stories of intimidation at the university. Confident, liberal, outward looking. I thought of her then as a symbol of the revolution. I assumed she'd have a great future in Libya's new democratic politics. But she's retreated from public life. Like other women who rose with the uprising, she's gone back to her old job as a lecturer. But students, she says, threaten her whenever she tries to improve the curriculum. They don't want to work harder. And her students, like almost everyone else in Libya, have got guns at every level. Then, from the Prime Minister down, it's a picture of authority being held to ransom. Normal, some say, after any revolution. Inevitable, perhaps, after 42 years in Gaddafi's straightjacket. Frightening, certainly, for many Libyans, and disappointing too for us, because Benghazi was saved two years ago from Gaddafi's bloody revenge by French and British missiles. The UK spent £212 million on that military campaign. The long distance foreign involvement is partly why we covered every dusty, dangerous mile of that long desert road, and why I ended up remembering Lady Smith and her sudden comforture. But the relief of Rassel Anoof would have been even more puzzling to my great grandmother as she pulled the pints for her clack in the crown and cushion.
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Tim Whewell, back now from Benghazi in Libya. Burma, or Myanmar as it's also known, continues to be a place of quite spectacular change. This week, the news was less about its fast developing economy, more about an agreement with a rebel group which has spent years battling the government for control of their tribal areas in the north. But on the economic front, the country's prospects are being transformed. A steady stream of foreign investors and donors are flying in, keen to do business. But as Jonathan Head's been finding out, for all the talk, there isn't a lot of money flowing in yet.
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There are very few big cities left in Asia where from a top floor vantage point, you can still see palm trees and wooden boats puttering along a brown river. A skyline marked out not by concrete and glass towers, but by the turrets and brickwork of colonial architecture and by golden Buddhist stupas. Yangon still has this view, but it won't be for long. Construction cranes now swing across newly cleared patches of ground all over the city. Its battered old roads are clogged by a recent invasion of imported cars. And in stylishly renovated old buildings, there are new bars and restaurants feeding an eclectic crowd of NGO workers, young Burmese entrepreneurs and foreign venture capitalists. They're calling Myanmar the last untapped opportunity in Asia. A market of 60 million people in need of pretty much everything. Those brave enough to jump in first goes the thinking, will reap the richest rewards. But just who is getting rich on this buccaneering new frontier? The biggest numbers are being thrown around by the Japanese. You can't move in Yangon without bumping into yet another coachload of Japanese businessmen. In eagerly taking notes and snapshots every week there's another grand announcement from corporate Japan. A planned factory here, a new power station there. The government in Tokyo is throwing aid at Myanmar, offering to upgrade anything from its railways to its national grid. While the country was under international sanctions, Japan had to grit its teeth and watch as its arch rival China, courted the then military government for deals and favours. You get the strong impression that it's rushing in now to make up for those lost years. Rushing in, but not with much actual cash. Yet the Burmese Call us NATO, says Masaaki Takahara, the genial head of Jetro, the export promotion arm of the Japanese government. No action talk only all he says. We're called the four L's. Look, listen, learn and leave. Much the same is true of British businesses. There are almost constant trade missions. 18 Smaller companies in one earlier this month. The Lord Mayor of London just the other day. But little real investment. Why not? There are some very basic infrastructure problems. Myanmar is chronically short of electricity. One local factory owner showed me the three generators he uses to keep his 1500 garment workers employed during the frequent blackouts. But he explained his fuel costs are so high that even with the lowest wages in Southeast Asia, it's a struggle to make a profit. Then there's the shortage of suitable buildings. As a result, office rents in downtown Yangon are as high as in New York and much higher than in neighboring Bangkok. There's confusion over the rules of doing business too. The banking system is so primitive that payments are often made with bags full of cash. Of course, the same problems confront Burmese businesses. But after living for so many years under the suffocating blanket of sanctions and military rule, their mood is ebullient. I found myself sitting one evening with a group of well heeled women in a luxury spa, sipping champagne and listening to their business triumphs. One woman had left school at 17 to help bring up her younger brothers. Today she's the brand manager for a European cosmetics giant. Another young entrepreneur I met had returned recently from Britain to help run a multi million investment fund, but has decided to try developing mobile banking services as well. In a country where mobile phones have become available even before most people have the Internet or regular electricity. His office sits in a half built technology park surrounded by trees and tropical mud. And then there was 27 year old Thierry, who runs a phone shop and blazes with ambition. She told me she's taking management classes for two hours every evening after work. It was all very uplifting, reinforcing the impression of a country eager to move on. But it is only a small fraction of Myanmar's people who are riding this wave. A boat ride across the vast floodplain of the Irrawaddy delta brought me to a small temple school funded by a donation from a local NGO and entirely surrounded by water. The children paddled to class in dugout canoes. But before it was built last year, they didn't go to school at all. During the rainy season, their parents are farmers and labourers. Their village has no electricity and little in the way of Health care. I asked the abbot of the temple what all the recent changes in the country meant to him. He had to think for a few seconds. Well, nothing, he said. Except for this school. That's all we got.
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Jonathan Head in Burma. Police in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh have now arrested more than a hundred people after fighting broke out between Hindus and Muslims last month. Those detained include a number of local polit accused of inciting the violence, which has left more than 40 people dead. Joanna Jolly has been to the area to report on the aftermath of the fighting. And listening to accounts of violence and suffering, she found herself becoming involved in ways she hadn't expected.
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My local colleague Joydeep told me that amidst the violence there was a story of hope Here. We had found anger on both sides of the divide in the town of Massafranaga, neighbor pitted against neighbor rioters. On the streets. At first all seemed normal. Dogs were barking. There was a power cut. But it didn't take long to find resentment on the Hindu side, the community known as Jats. They insisted the Muslims had been favoured by local politicians. But then the Muslims told us that they'd been betrayed. In a madrasa, an Islamic religious school, we met hundreds of Muslim men who'd fled their homes and were living rough in the school's courtyard. A community leader told us that for decades Muslims and Hindus had lived together peacefully. But now, he said, they feared for their lives. As he spoke, a crowd of maybe a hundred men formed around us. They pressed in closely. Joydeep whispered he was worried it was time we left, but first we wanted to investigate that story of hope. We followed some of the men over streams of filthy water in into a group of small brick houses, through an iron gate, into a courtyard. There, in the arms of a seven year old boy, was a tiny baby. The men said the girl had been found 10 days ago in a ditch. Her umbilical cord was still attached and she was being mauled by dogs. They were convinced she was a Hindu child and said it was only the generosity of a good Muslim woman that had kept her alive. The woman had taken her in, even though she had eight children of her own. I wanted to meet this woman, so the men pushed her forward. She was small but well built. Joydeep, who was translating, said she was 36, but she seemed decades older. We asked the men to leave us so we could talk to her. They stood back, but still didn't give us much space. The woman sat down and held the baby in her arms and the child was dressed in A red top, far too big for her, and a small green hat. Her eyelids had been painted black with coal. She was tiny and hardly made a sound. Her skin was yellow, presumably from jaundice. You have so many children, I asked. Why look after one more? I'm hoping she'll grow up to go to school and study, she said. I hope she's clever and can get a government job. Then she can look after me. She smiled. I looked at the tiny, sickly baby and wondered if she'd survive at all. I couldn't see any food in the courtyard, nor anything suggesting there was money to look after her. We have a rule as journalists not to give anything, usually to the people we interview, and it's a rule I've always followed. But the thought of the baby not having food was too much for me. I want to give money, I I said to Joydeep. He looked around nervously at the crowd of men pressing in. Do what you need to, he said, but do it quickly. Pretending to put a camera into my backpack, I reached inside and scrunched up a banknote in my hand. It was no more than you'd pay for a sandwich in London, but here it could feed the baby for a few weeks. I held out my hand and offered it to the mother in a handshake. At first she looked puzzled. It's not usual to shake hands with a woman in India. But then she felt the scratch of paper in her palm, and she realized what I was doing. By now, Joydie was very nervous. We have to go, he said. The group of men surged round us as we moved back to our car. One man stood in front of me, furiously demanding money. Just as I was beginning to wonder whether he'd hit me, I felt a warm touch around my stomach. It was the woman. She leant her head on my shoulder, affectionately, it seemed, and slowly but surely she guided me through the angry crowd. Keep the money secret, I whispered. Keep it for yourself. She wouldn't let me go. Another man started shouting in my face. She held me even closer, and she didn't let me go until I was safely inside our car. The money I had given her was nothing. Certainly it wouldn't make much difference. I wasn't expecting anything in return. But I felt she'd repaid me a hundred times over with a kindness and strength that humbled me.
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And that was Joanna Jolly. There's a growing sense of foreboding in several Central Asian countries as NATO troops continue their withdrawal from Afghanistan. We know that all US Combat troops are due out by the end of the year. But we don't yet know what that'll mean for Afghanistan and its neighbors. This week, one Russian newspaper said it had seen a secret Kremlin report suggesting that thousands of Taliban and other jihadist fighters had already crossed over from Afghanistan into Tajikistan. James Kumarasamy has just been to the border between those two countries to see what preparations are being made for the post NATO era. He met one man who has already been on the receiving end of cross border violence.
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With his square green embroidered tubicheka hat, loose fitting lilac jacket and blue striped running shoes, he was an unlikely looking shepherd, an even more unlikely looking action hero. In fact, his physical resemblance to the actor John Cleese gave him the air of a cinematic anti hero. But earlier this year, this 61 year old Tajik shepherd had encountered three armed Afghan militants and survived. He told me his story in the eastern town of Kuliab, the nearest a foreigner can get to the closed, unstable area between Tajikistan and Afghanistan where he tends his flock. We met in the early evening, the sustained, almost hypnotic twittering of birds providing an oddly calming backdrop to his dramatic tale. He took some time to tell it, savoring every detail of how he and three friends were captured and tied up by the Kalashnikov wielding Afghans. He'd never known his captor's intentions, but guessed they had decided to kidnap him for cash or kill him for sport. He chuckled and gestured, hopping on one training shoe as he showed me how the Afghans had ordered him to swap his flimsy sandals for rubber boots for what he expected was going to be a difficult march ahead. But they couldn't find a pair that fit, and he grew animated as he described the fight which followed from its confused beginning, with one Afghan slipping, one shackled Tajik grabbing and shots being fired to its clear conclusion. Three Afghans and one Tajik dead, the shepherd and two of his friends alive. There have been other incidents of this kind, and local villagers fear that there will be many more when the Americans conclude their homeward trek. To find out how prepared the Tajik authorities are, I travelled 4 and a half hours from Cooliab along rutted roads to the border post which spans the River Pyange. There I had watched Tajik border guards in action. Not that there had been much action to see as the senior officer and I sauntered across the US funded friendship Bridge. Everything seemed perfectly friendly. A few NATO trucks rumbled southwards into Afghanistan on nothing more menacing than a minibus with a few Smiling Afghan men on board came the other way. Since the bridge was opened in 2007, we were told the main difference had been a welcome influx of exotic fruits not seen by Tajix for years. When the officer showed us their simple customs building, where identity papers are scoured and a bear like doctor with a dangling blue face mask consults a wall chart to check whether new arrivals have symptoms of infectious diseases, he seemed perfectly calm. But standing over the water on the Afghan border itself, ripples of concern began spreading across his face. Come next year, he believes, the exotic fruits will be replaced by less benign cargoes. When the Americans leave, I'm sure there'll be chaos, he said, gazing ruefully into Afghan territory. The fighting between their clans, their gangs and the Taliban will begin again. Our life will become much more difficult. The Tajiks insist that they are ready, but according to one of the guards, Central Asia's poorest country only has two helicopters to patrol its 800 mile border with Afghanistan. Sniffer dogs are being trained for the expected spike in drug traffic, which has already been increasing even with the American troops in the area. As we drove east to meet the shepherd, skirting along the edge of the border zone, we were twice stopped at checkpoints by bored looking soldiers. Sitting at the kind of tables you'd see at a school fair entrance, they hardly seemed coiled and ready to repel unwelcome visitors. Shy schoolgirls scurried by wearing floor length black and white dresses and shielding their faces from the sun and from us with their textbooks. Men sat in the shade, chewing the local green tobacco called nosy, an unappetizing pulp made from something resembling whitewash and fresh tobacco leaves. The soldiers chewed over our British passports more out of curiosity than menace, meticulously copying every detail into a folder whose final destination remained a mystery. What's also uncertain at this point is the effect of NATO's withdrawal from Afghanistan. That makes it hard for bordering countries such as Tajikistan Turkish to draw up detailed contingency plans. But our local hero shepherd is in no doubt how he wants to prepare. It's not my generation I'm worried about, he insisted. It's my children's. So tell our government to give us weapons and we'll defend our land ourselves. And as he strode off in his blue running shoes, I got the impression that part of him was looking forward to his next encounter with Afghan gunmen and to telling the story of how the Afghans came off second best.
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James Kumarasamy in Tajikistan now what's the most famous street in the world Arguably, it's the Champs Elysees in Paris. A mile long boulevard of exclusive cafes, glittering designer shops and clipped horse chestnut trees. It's one of the city's main tourist attractions with the Arc de Triomphe at one end and the Place de la Concorde at the other. Every year tens of millions of visitors come to shop, stroll and savour being in what's often called the most beautiful avenue in the world. So why isn't our Paris correspondent Hugh Scofield also in love with this celebrated slice of real estate? Well, let's let him explain.
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I think I'm getting a reputation as the local nutter. Down the end of the street where the BBC office is situated on the corner with the Champs Elysees, someone recently got authorisation to run an on street business venture in that has my blood boiling every morning. There are three or four ultra expensive, brightly coloured open top sports cars, lambarettis or mazzaghinis or something with the words Drive Me painted on the side. Some rapper style individuals lounge around in garments bearing the logo Dream on Board. Can you think of a more clunking ugly slogan than Dream on Board? That's the new globalized English for you. Anyway, it obviously works because there's a constant small crowd of tourists gathered around taking pictures of themselves and their friends in front of these garish totems of abject ostentation. And occasionally one of them will shell out the €90 and go for a closely supervised spin around the block. So why am I becoming the local loony? Because every morning when I cycle past I can't help grinding my teeth and snarling a bit like the elderly Clint Eastwood in the film Gran Torino and muttering not so sotto voce pathetic interjections such as it's only a car in the direction of the gawking tourists and the preening minders who when they hear me, stare back in total bewilderment. What planet is he on? Is the general drift. But you see, Dream on Board to me is the modern Champs Crass Stylus. Expensive but naff. A year or two ago I spotted a long line of people outside an elegant early 19th century building down the bottom end near Avenue Montaigne.
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Aha.
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I thought maybe a new gallery or some rich philanthropist has opened his mansion for the elevation of the masses. But no. This particular hotel Particulier had been acquired by a well known American clothing company. And to this day the queues of shoppers, some of them oddly Americans, still stretch round the block while the narcissistic boy greeters turning vanity into an art form, pose with swooning young females from Colombia or Taiwan. Lest you take this as the cantankerous rambling of a xenophobic sourpuss, let me assure you that most Parisians feel exactly the same way as I do. Most Parisians don't go to the Champs Elysees, except maybe at Christmas to see the lights. They know it's crowded, stressful, overpriced, essentially a place for people not from the city to get a glimpse of an imaginary Paris that doesn't actually exist. Indeed, it's a standing joke at the BBC that if you want to go through that essential journalistic ritual known as the Vaux Pop, what the French call micro trottois pavement microphone, what you don't do is go to Paris's most famous street. Why? Because you'll find it very hard to identify anyone on the Champs Elysees who's actually French. One person who I know agrees with me is Florian Anselm, author of a recent book called the Hidden Life of the Champs Elysees. He bemoaned to me the loss of the old Champs, where Parisians would come and flannet, stroll beneath the plane trees, take a coffee, meet friends, go window shopping outside the luxury stores, all rather charming and French. Thirty years ago, he said, when Jacques Chirac was mayor, it started changing. The big brands came in, Gulf Arabs began buying up the property, the flaneur flanned away and what they left behind is also, in parts, increasingly insalubrious. The Rue de Ponthieu, for example, a side street of the Champs Elysees, though taking its romantic sounding name from a northern French dukedom that was once the appanage of medieval kings of England, now has a line of nightclubs favoured by footballers, the borne drug rich and escort girls transplanted to modern day Paris. The caricaturist William Hogarth would have done a wonderful drawing there on the evils of cocaine, violence and electronic music played at very loud volumes. The young woman I saw urinating in the gutter at 7am last Sunday would probably have featured it's all a great shame, because the Champs Elysees, the Lysian field after all, is is in its conception a majestic piece of town planning. The long vista is still breathtaking and in the lower part where the gardens are, it remains pretty much unchanged. But too long has it rested on its laurels like some corrupt late Roman emperor. Today, if I'm asked by first time visitors where they should go in Paris, my advice is love the Louvre, marvel at the Marais, Elate at the Ile de la Cite, and get an eyeful of the Eiffel. But as Lewis Carroll said of the frumious Bandersnatch, shun the Champs Elysees.
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Unequivocal advice there from our man in Paris, Hugh Schofield. And with that, we're done. Back next week on both Thursday and Saturday with more from around the world. Until then, goodbye.