← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
East or West?
00:27:57
Correspondents with stories from the news. Today, Steve Rosenberg on how Ukraine's in...
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Hello. This is from our own correspondent, a download from BBC Radio.
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And here with the latest addition is Kate Ady.
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Hello. Today, how the worst storm in 150 years brought death and despair to cattle ranchers in America's Great Plains. In the Sahara Desert, it's lack of rain that's the problem. Although not for Al Qaeda, for whom drought is proving an effective recruiting sergeant. We're in the Peruvian town where future prosperity might depend more on caffeine than cocaine. And in swiftly chang changing Burma, where modernization has yet to catch up with the slow train from Mandalay. But first, police in Ukraine have forcibly broken up a demonstration against President Viktor Yanukovych in the capital Kiev. Dozens of people are reported to have been hurt when police used batons and tear gas to disperse a crowd of several hundred in the early hours of this morning. The US ambassador in Ukraine has condemned what he described as the violence against peaceful protesters. Earlier, thousands gathered on Independence Square to protest against the President's refusal to sign a partnership deal with the European Union. Georgia and Moldova initialled the trade agreement at a summit in Lithuania yesterday. Mr. Yanukovych, who's spoken of coming under pressure from Moscow, says he still wants to sign up, but economically his country's still too fragile. Steve Rosenberg's been travelling in Ukraine trying to find out whether its people believe their future lies with the west or the east.
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In the second half of the 20th century, Europe's geopolitical fault lines were very clear, and so was the language used to describe them. Europe was divided by an Iron Curtain and consumed by a Cold War, and everyone on both sides of this divide knew exactly where they stood. Well, it's more than 20 years now since that Iron Curtain was dismantled. But the end of the Cold War did not signal the end of confrontation on the continent of Europe. Today, Russia and the European Union may be economic partners, but they are also political rivals. They compete for influence in what was once Soviet territory, in countries traditionally in Moscow's sphere of influence, like Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, and the biggest prize of all, Ukraine. The EU has been keen to sign an association agreement with Kiev, what would be an historic deal on political ties and trade. Russia wants Ukraine to join its economic bloc, its version of the eu, the Eurasian Customs Union. And so Ukraine has found itself pulled in two directions. And Moscow and Brussels have accused each other of. Of pulling too hard. In the post Cold War era, how should we label this tussle between east and West? In recent days, I've heard it described as a tug of war, and even as A geopolitical love triangle. Political scientists prefer the less colorful and more clinical phrase zero sum game. But for the Ukrainian people, this is no game. What's at stake here is their future. In the town of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, I visit a refrigerator factory. It's not far from the Russian border, about an hour's drive, but walking around the factory floor, it feels as if I'm in Russia. All the staff are speaking Russian. There are giant signs in Russian declaring, dear workers, thank you for your labour and what have you done today to make our fridges more competitive? One of the managers presents me with a beautifully bound souvenir book marking the fridge factory's 50th anniversary. And that's in Russian too. Like many enterprises in the heavily industrialized east of Ukraine, this one relies heavily on the Russian market. And that is why the staff here seem in no hurry for closer ties with Europe. The factory fears that if Ukraine signs a free trade deal with the European Union, it will lose the opportunity of exporting cheaply to its main market in the east. Russian customs duties would make these fridges 35% more expensive than they are now. They'd be priced out of the market. So earlier this month, the company's president had had a meeting with the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and asked him not to sign the association agreement with the eu. A few days later, the Ukrainian government announced that the deal was off. Instead, it would try to repair economic ties with Russia. I get chatting to one of the workers on the production line, Aliyah. Russia's much more important to me right now than Europe, Aliak says, because that's where we send our fridges to. I don't want anything to break those links. I travel on to Lviv in western Ukraine, and in the Catholic cathedral there I meet an actor called Andrei. His son's being baptised. It's baby Francis, in honour of the Pope. Andrei tells me that he's proud to be a Ukrainian citizen, but like his country, he too is torn between east and West. His mother is Russian, his father is Polish. Andre is a romantic, a dreamer. His principle in life is that anything is possible. On his wedding day, he dressed up as an 18th century nobleman and rode to the ceremony on a white horse. The wedding ceremony itself was conducted in a hot air balloon high above the local park. It hadn't been easy to organise. The registrar was afraid of heights, but Andrei had insisted. After all, he tells me, marriages are made in heaven. Political marriages, though, are made in more mundane places. Sometimes at summits, other times at secret meetings, in backroom deals and normally out of political calculations rather than love, I ask Andrei whom he believes his country should embrace, the EU or Russia. I want Ukraine to be closer to Europe because that's where democracy is and freedom of speech, andrei explains. But I don't want my little boy to go hungry. And right now, for economic reasons, Ukraine can't afford not to have a relationship with Russia. What worries me, though, he continues, is is Russian imperialism. It's not in Russia's interest to let Ukraine go. And the problem is that if we keep taking the bread that Russia hands out to us, we'll just keep coming back for more. We'll never be our own masters.
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That was Steve Rosenberg. Tens of thousands of refugees, some of whom fled the fighting in Mali earlier this year, are continuing to languish in a refugee camp in a remote desert corner of neighbouring Mauritania. Many of those in the notorious Mbera camp are Tuareg people whose status used to be measured in the number of goats, sheep, donkeys and camels they owned. Today, most have had to abandon their animals and see little chance of returning to their old lives across the border. A serious drought in the countries bordering the Sahara Desert has made matters worse for the refugees and the charities trying to help them. But Chris Terrell says it's proving a boon for the militant Islamist groups operating in the area.
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If the middle of nowhere has a geographical position, I've just been there and Beira, 1,000 miles into the arid interior of Mauritania, is as isolated and remote as it's searingly hot. Rolling dunes shimmer in the heat haze, and powerful desert winds blast the burning sand skywards, swirling, twisting, billowing into massive orange clouds. This barren, parched wilderness would normally be uninhabited, but through the veil of windblown sand, I can just make out the shape of tents, rickety huts and the silhouettes of people many people sheltering from the savage sun. I'd come to mbera, home to 87,000 Malian refugees, to track down some Tuareg nomads I'd ridden with two years ago, before the troubles, which saw Al Qaeda related militants seizing Timbuktu and much of northern Mali. Searching this sprawling camp was an enormous task. But eventually, extraordinarily, amid the throng, a stocky, swarthy man stepped towards me. He was draped in the traditional light blue gown of a Tuareg warrior, his head and face wrapped in the long black cloth that constitutes a Tuareg's turban, leaving only the eyes visible. Assalamualaikum Mr. Chris. He exclaimed, before revealing a face I recognized instantly. His name was Siddharthi Agmohamed, the very man who taught me how to ride a camel back in the Malian desert. He embraced me, uttering Alhamdulillah, praise be to God. But there was sadness in his black eyes. I remembered him as a smiling, cheerful man with many goats and camels, high status Tuareg. But now he had little reason to smile. He no longer roamed the Sahara freely as a proud nomad, but languished as a refugee, rooted to the spot. All his animals left behind in Mali, probably dead. The refugees who'd lived nearest the border managed to bring some livestock and donkeys with which they now shared what little water they had. But most, like Sedate, had to leave their animals behind or had lost them to recurrent drought. And here's the rub. You might assume that in the face of conflict and repeatedly failing rains, there could be no winners. But you'd be wrong, you see, right across the Maghreb, the Sahel, and into the parched wastes of northern Kenya and Somalia, where I've also been travelling. Drought, that most insidious of natural hazards so often accompanied by social and economic breakdown, is for some proving to be an attractive proposition, a valuable and welcome asset, a boon, no less. It's precisely where drought hits hardest that militant Islamists like Al Qaeda and Al Shabaab, bent on regional and even global destabilization, find their perfect sanctuary. Hostile, arid quarters, far from the reach of authorities or security forces. And not only that. Here they find ideal opportunities to recruit. Fighting age males, desperate and eager young men who've lost their animals are only too happy to swell the rebel ranks. And why not? In place of impoverishment, they get an AK47, a few dollars, and the prospect of glorious martyrdom. Well, if I was a young nomad dispossessed by drought, facing hopeless destitution in a refugee camp, or life as a crusade soldier of God, I know what I would choose. Aluar Akbar. No brainer, surely. In northeast Somalia, at a place called Tula Amin, I visited another camp specifically for victims of drought. There were no animals here, and significantly, no young men either, just women and children. A group of elders confirmed that after two consecutive years of rain failure, most of their animals were dead and and their young men had either migrated to the cities or moved to the bush to join Al Shabaab. Back in Mbira refugee camp, my friend Siddarth Agmohamad was not considering the Islamist option. But the same could not be said of others. The militant Islamists are not fools. They pick and choose their areas of operation carefully, and places prone to drought are for them ideal, especially if the animals, the people's raison d', etre are dead or dying. Maybe it's not too far fetched to suggest that a much greater effort to protect the livestock and working animals in Africa's drought zone would go some way to depriving the jihadists of manpower and spiking the guns of those who attack places like Timbuktu and the Westgate Mall in Nairobi. Now, in fairness, the UNHCR overseeing Mbera is actively safeguarding the welfare of the people's animals. But that doesn't make the area safe from jihadists patiently waiting for the rains to fail. For these extremists, drought has become a highly effective recruiting sergeant Chris Terrell in
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Mauritania Freak weather in the Great Plains area of the United States has killed thousands of cattle and now threatens to ruin the livelihoods of the herders who depend on the animals for their living. A storm they called Atlas did the damage. First it brought heavy rain to South Dakota, then high winds and an exceptionally heavy snowfall. Few of the ranchers have insurance, and as Sybil Ruskoe from Farming Today has been finding out in the Black Hills, in the absence of any significant state or federal assistance, local communities have been trying to help each other out.
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The week before the storm, it had been wet and mild, and the prairies of the Great Plains were deep in mud. And then the first winter snow came early and unexpectedly in an icy blast from the North West. Trapped in the mud, 30,000 cattle suffocated and froze to death. They were buried in 20 foot snowdrifts, entombed in ice in what the ranchers call the breaks and draws, the slopes and the valleys of the rolling prairie hills. Larry Stomprudd is a tall, thin cowboy wearing a black leather waistcoat and slim cut blue jeans. Grey hair peeps from beneath his brown cowboy hat. He's a tough rancher who spent half a century herding cattle. But his voice falters and there are tears in his eyes as he describes the devastation on his ranch. I looked at my grandfather's records, he says quietly. It was the worst storm for 150 years. His throat is strangled with anguish and sadness. He says, God entrusted us with the care of these animals, and we failed them. At Lone Tree Ranch in Mead County, 3,000ft up in the undulating hills that stretch out over the prairie like giant sand dunes. Larry Reinhold shows me Costello Point, where nearly a hundred of his horses perished. In cash terms, his losses will run to around a quarter of a million dollars. It's not the money, he says. These animals were our friends. It's heartbreaking. Larry runs Ranch Holidays for children from all over America, and his business is now in jeopardy. In the community of Box Elder, Monty and Bobby Jo Williams lost 200 Angus beef cattle. But they did find one small calf buried in the snow and still alive 17 days after the storm. We have to trust that things will be ok, says Larry, holding his two year old daughter. Our little girl has kept us going. We have to think about the future. The situation has been made worse for South Dakota's ranchers because the blizzard hit while politicians in Washington were doing their own wrangling over budgets in the US government shutdown. In a state guarded by the rocky faces of the four great American presidents carved into Mount Rushmore, the farmers have no government aid package and and no hope of help until Congress agrees on a new US farm bill, which isn't expected anytime soon. But ranch folk help each other and in an inspiring act of charity, Ty Linger, a young Christian rancher from Montana, has created Heifers for South Dakota, a sort of cattle aid for farmers who've lost livestock. My inspiration is Galatians 6:10, he beams, saluting me with his cowboy hat and wearing a jaunty red silk scarf, dressed tied at his neck. Those lines from the Bible say if you have the chance, do some good. And Ty's leap of faith has seen farmers from neighbouring states donate 650 cattle to ranchers in need. We meet in a yard teeming with tons of prime beef. Cowboys and cowgirls are herding the animals onto waiting trucks as the recipient farmers shake the donors hands with tearful gratitude. I thought if I got just one cow, it would help. Someone shouts Ty, standing on the wooden rails of the corral. But they just keep coming. He laughs. On Sunday, the white clapperboard Foothills Community Church gleams in the bright winter sunshine under a big blue prairie sky as families arrive in pickup trucks for the morning service. It's the Sunday before Thanksgiving and the pastor, Brian Carpenter, a huge bearded man in a grey T shirt and slacks, welcomes me with a hug and invites me for lunch. Smoked beef brisket. You won't get that back in Britain, says Brian. He talks of his fondness for the BBC. He listens on the Internet as he strides around his cosy little church, taking his place at the lectern Ty linger from Heifers for South Dakota is invited up to the front, and there are quiet tears as he's presented with a donation from the Foothills Church. The congregation sings Count your blessings, and Brian's sermon has a Thanksgiving theme. Be thankful in all circumstances, he urges, even when the times are tough. Outside, he shakes my hand, saying quietly that South Dakota's ranchers have God to thank for their survival after the storm, not the government.
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And that was Sybil Rascoe. There have been huge changes over the past couple of years in Burma. The government there says it's committed to turning this former military dictatorship into a proper democracy, releasing political prisoners and ending censorship. It has also opened up the economy. In the main city, Rangoon, there are now new cars on the roads, there's WI fi and huge numbers of smartphones. But for most of the population, the impact of the changes is barely felt, as James Menendez has been discovering on what he'd hoped would be a train journey to Savour.
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After two weeks of long, uncomfortable car journeys and flights on airlines with, let's say, unproven safety records, the prospect of a train ride was something to look forward to. After all, what's more relaxing than watching the landscape speed by? From the comfort of a railway carriage, visions of teak, panelled compartments and elegant dining cars flashed through my mind. Even the name sounded impossibly romantic. The Mandalay to Lashio Express, a train that was built more than a hundred years ago by the British to ferry sunburnt army officers from the hot plains of central Burma to the cool mountains of the Northeast. Sadly, like modern day Mandalay, the reality is rather different. For a start, there'd be no speeding through the countryside. The whole route is only 180 miles, but it takes about 16 hours, not counting unforeseen delays. There's also little in the way of comfort we'd splashed out on upper class. An extra £1.50 for the best that Burma's railways had to offer seemed like a price worth paying. Sadly, it wasn't. There only seemed to be two main differences between upper and ordinary. Yes, we had upholstered seats instead of wooden benches, but wooden benches can be wiped. Our cushions seemed to have trapped several decades worth of dust that billowed into the air as we sat down. There were also windows in Upper, but they were so dirty you couldn't see out. I even spotted a rat. Never mind. At least we weren't in the car again. No, this was far worse. It quickly became apparent that years of underinvestment had turned this train into a roller coaster. The first time we hit a patch of badly buckled track, everyone yelped and flew into the air. There was also the unnerving sight of seeing the carriage behind lurching violently from side to side with open doors. It was clear that even at 10 miles per hour, there was a real risk of being thrown out. In fact, we nearly didn't make it to the end. Thinking all the stops would be a good 20 minutes, a colleague and I went to stretch our legs. Foolishly, we ignored the first blast of the horn, only to see the train pull away from the station. That was the only time I was grateful it was so slow. We did manage to jump back on. The highlight for all new passengers is the viaduct at Goktek. Several hundred feet tall, it was built for the British by American engineers. And it's not for the faint hearted or for anyone worried about the lack of maintenance on the line. From a distance, it did look to be in remarkable condition. And apparently it was renovated for the first time 20 years ago. It was only when we actually went over it that we noticed the liberal application of silver coloured paint. I can't be sure what lay underneath. Not that any of this had the slightest impact on most of the people on the train. Burmese traders with huge sacks of vegetables who had no problem dozing through the lurching and the creaking. Gripping firmly onto the seat handles, we asked them how life had changed in Burma recently. Some just shrugged, struggling to think of anything apart from the rising cost of living. One young teacher returning from a wedding told us her school now had whiteboards instead of blackboards. Most seemed bemused that anyone, especially a foreigner, would even care what they thought. And this is the paradox in Burma at the moment. On the one hand, people are able to express their opinions in a way that was unthinkable not long ago, and foreign reporters are now free to listen to those opinions without interference. On the other hand, the novelty of that freedom feels as if it's starting to fade. Like the train, Burma has been starved of investment for decades, the money from its vast natural resources siphoned off by the generals and their friends. Outside the main cities, regular electricity and running water are rare. Few countries spend so little on health and education. Freedom means little if living standards aren't improving. For the Mandalay to Lashio train, well, clearly my Edwardian fantasies won't return it to its former glory. Quite the opposite. Burma needs to shake off its past. Not just colonialism, but its authoritarian and corrupt Legacy too. This country does have a bright future. It's not a time for nostalgia.
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James Menendez. The Peruvian government having mixed success in its bid to lose its title as the world's biggest producer of coca leaves. For centuries, the leaf has played a significant role in Andean culture and religion. But it's also at the heart of an illegal trade in cocaine worth billions of pounds. So the authorities in the capital, Lima, have now rolled out an anti drug strategy which aims to persuade farmers to ditch the leaf and plant other crops instead of. But Robin Lustig's been learning that in the foothills of the Andes, not everyone's impressed.
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I should probably have listened just a little more carefully when the farmer answered my question. I'd asked if she would show me where her hidden coca plantation was. And what she said was, yes, of course, but it'll mean a bit of walking. Now, I like walking. I walk for pleasure. But what a Peruvian farmer means by a bit of walking turned out to be rather different from what I mean. We are in the region known as the High Amazon, its breathtakingly beautiful green, lush hillsides and steep wooded valleys where the foothills of the Andes meet the Amazon jungle. Traditionally, it's been one of the main production centres for Peruvian cocaine, which is why I was there. And although the government is committed to eradicating the cultivation of the coca leaf from which cocaine is made, there is still plenty of it about. Hence my walk in the jungle. We set off following the farmer, her husband and their dog down a steep, muddy path. He carried a machete and hacked away at the undergrowth to clear a way for us down the side of the valley. After I'd already landed on my backside half a dozen times, he cut a stout pole to help me keep my balance. After maybe 40 minutes or so of slipping and sliding, we reached the bottom. And as is often the case at the bottom of valleys, there was a river. Not a huge river, admittedly, but a river nonetheless, and we obviously were going to have to cross it. There wasn't a bridge, but there was a tree trunk. By this time, I was carrying two stout poles plus a backpack. But I was helped across by the farmer's husband, who gripped my hand tightly as I inched along the tree trunk and their dog splashing excitedly through the water, tail wagging, egging me on. Clambering up the other side was a lot easier than sliding down had been. And when we eventually reached the coca clearing, I finally got a chance to catch my breath and to talk to our companions. I never learnt their names. They thought it was probably better for all of us if they remained anonymous. After all, as far as the authorities were concerned, they'd given up their illegal coca cultivation and were now growing coffee and bananas, which, to be fair, they were, but as well as the coca, not instead of it. So we sat and we talked. She was wearing a pink T shirt, a baseball cap, faded brown trousers and gumboots, stockily built, in her 40s and defensive about continuing to harvest a crop that her government says she shouldn't be growing. We can't make a living growing just coffee and bananas, she said. It takes years for those trees to become established. So what should we live on? We get no help from the government, so we have to grow the Coca Cola. She would love to stop, she said, but that may have been because she knew that was what she was meant to say. Yes, she knows what happens to the coca leaves after she's sold them. And she knows that criminal gangs control the trade in cocaine. I'm only growing a very small amount, she said. It really doesn't make any difference. The coca growers of Peru insist that they aren't the ones who get rich from the cocaine trade. Although I did meet one man, a former coca grower who's now switched entirely to cultivating coco instead of coca, who admitted that in his former life he did make a very good living. He spent his ill gotten gains, he told me, on gambling and drinking and women. Now, as a solid law abiding citizen with three jail terms behind him, he says he spends his more modest income on looking after his family. I don't have as much money as I used to have, he said, but I do sleep better at night. I don't have to worry any more about the police knocking on my door. Coca has been grown in Peru for thousands of years. If you chew the leaves or use them to make tea with, they act as a mild stimulant, a bit like a strong cup of coffee. I bought a small bag of coca leaves quite openly on a street corner in the central Peruvian town of Tingo Maria. It may sound like the name of an exotic liqueur. In fact, it's a thriving, bustling place. Its streets are jammed with Chinese made motorcycle taxis and it owes its prosperity almost entirely to coca. They are trying to adapt. In a smart New York style coffee bar, I was offered a very good cup of espresso made with locally grown beans. And the hope is that it's caffeine, not cocaine, on which the region's future prosperity will be built.
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And that's it. Robin Lustig enjoys a coffee in the Peruvian town of Tingo Maria and brings this edition to a close. There'll be more from our own correspondence next Saturday morning. Do join us. Goodbye.