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From Our Own Correspondent
Shifting Sands
00:28:27
Pauline Davies in the desert where nothing lives: the Atacama in Chile.
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- [00:00]
Kate Adie
Hello, this is the from our own correspondent office at Bush House in London. You can check out what we're up
- [00:05]
Andrew Harding
to by signing up to our Twitter feed. But here's a download of our latest programme on BBC Radio 4, introduced as
- [00:12]
Kate Adie
ever by Kate Ady.
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Program Narrator
Today, the outside world talks about sending in the troops. As the new guardians of Timbuktu destroy its famous monuments, there's another danger from Chernobyl. A summer heat wave could trigger a radioactive fire threatening farmland across Europe. It's 50 years since Algeria won independence from France. Today, there's speculation the French might be about to apologize. And once they were thriving mining communities in Chile's Atacama Desert. Now they're ghost towns. Nothing lives there. No birds, no plants, not even insects. A crime against history. That's UNESCO's verdict. After militant Islamists destroyed ancient Muslim sites in the Malian city of Timbuktu only days after it was proclaimed World Heritage Site. France says it's determined to stop the establishment of what it calls international terrorist bases in Mali. The Prime Minister, Jean Marc Ayrault, believes groups like Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb are threatening the peace and security of the whole region. Our Africa correspondent, Andrew Harding, says neighbouring countries are considering sending in troops to help the authorities in Mali reclaim their territory.
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Andrew Harding
I was alone and ambling through the cheerfully shambolic market in Timbuktu, swerving to avoid the donkeys and stopping to chat to some of the traders. For the past week, everyone from the governor to the imam to my guide and translator, Halas, had been earnestly assuring me that Timbuktu was safe. The threats of Al Qaeda and of kidnapping were being wildly exaggerated. I got talking to an Arab trader in the market, friendly enough. But when he asked me what hotel I was staying at, a small mental alarm bell rang and I changed the subject. A few minutes later, I found my guide, Hallis, and mentioned the conversation to him. His smile was chased away by something close to panic. I know, I said, it's safe here, he said, but you need to be careful. That was 2009. Today, the worst half formed fears of many in Timbuktu have turned into a choking reality. The headlines tell a story of sudden, unexpected catastrophe. First came the revolution in Libya. When it ended, weapons flooded south across the Sahara. That prompted some Tuareg tribesmen, dreaming of an independent state in northern Mali, to launch an armed rebellion earlier this year. But the rebellion was hijacked. Islamist militants, many from neighboring countries, charged across the sand dunes with even more guns and more money. And today, Timbuktu is under Sharia law. Gunmen patrol the streets, arresting men for smoking, forcing women to cover their heads and faces. The town's ancient Islamic shrines, the mausoleums of local Sufi saints, are being methodically torn down and ploughed back into the Saharan sands by militant outsiders who believe scrupulously that the veneration of shrines is un Islamic and intolerable. Of course, the roots of all this stretch back far beyond the last few months. The modern world has not been kind to the tribes scraping a living from the barren fringes of the desert. Climate change is part of it. But ships and planes and globalization have also destroyed the need for the camel trains that used to bring legitimate goods across the Sahara. So the smugglers took over, ferrying drugs, guns and migrants towards Europe instead. Then came the militants hiding in the desert among the smugglers, the making money from kidnapping and destroying Mali's emerging tourism industry in the process. Now Timbuktu is half empty. Halas has fled. So has anyone else with the money and the opportunity. I've been speaking by phone to several people who stayed on. All of them asked me not to use their names. I'm very scared, said one man who used to work in the tourism industry. My family can't leave the house anymore. We thought these people were rebels, but they're not. They're Al Qaeda. They steal everything. They're not good Muslims. We eat once a day, sometimes not at all. And now they go to our mosques and destroy all our important things. Some are 400 years old. I've never been to a place more in touch, more enthralled with its own history than Timbuktu. It may be a dusty backwater these days, but it was once the Oxford of Africa, a thriving 15th century university town. People still keep boxes of ancient manuscripts in their storerooms and under beds. Not long ago, the former South African president, Thabo Mbeki helped to organize the building of a new library and research centre to save the manuscripts for future generations. When I was there in 2009, the new library had yet to open. But workmen supervised by international experts were stripping back layers of ancient mud from the giant Sankoro mosque in in the centre of town, then carefully slapping on a new glistening coat. This week, the town's new guardians have been hard at work attacking shrines with pickaxes and shovels and destroying the door of another important mosque, a door that, according to local tradition, will bring misfortune if it's opened. There is talk now of a military offensive led by Malian troops and neighboring armies to liberate a region that many fear is becoming a new hub for militants from Nigeria to Somalia and beyond. In theory, it shouldn't be that hard to recapture. On a map, the region looks vast, the size of France, but it's mostly desert, with a handful of small towns now largely abandoned by the civilian population. Still, these things take a while to organize. Who knows what will be left of Timbuktu's heritage by the time Hallis and tens of thousands like him return home?
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Program Narrator
And that was Andrew Harding. Now, you may think the danger from that explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine is no longer with us. The blast back in 1986 sent a radioactive cloud over large parts of the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Here, the weather forecast gained a huge new audience as people tried to work out if the emissions were coming their way and if rain would bring radioactive particles showering down onto their neighbourhoods. Today, the extensive pine plantations close to the site are still contaminated, and Patrick Evans has been finding out there are fears that summer wildfires could have a devastating effect not just locally, but further afield as well.
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Sergei Zibtsev
Heading north from Kiev, you can see old ladies and their granddaughters sitting waiting expectantly in the long grass shaded from a sweltering sun under the straight red eaves of tall, orderly Scots pines which line the road. It's blueberry season, and they're selling them by the plastic pint glass you could pull into haggle, but Sergei Zibtsev, a professor from the Forestry Institute at the Kiev University of Life Sciences, doesn't recommend it. They're laced with the radioactive particle strontium Berries are highly efficient at soaking up and storing radioactive particles, huge quantities of which were dispersed over large parts of the Soviet Union and Western Europe by smoke from the explosion. Radiation measurement checks only take place in official markets, and usually only for another different particle, cesium. As for the hundreds of makeshift fruit stalls run by old ladies, these are never checked at all. Having said this, the berries are not uniformly harmful. In an average pint of them, perhaps only a quarter will be contaminated. The main thing is to make sure that you don't put them on your cereal every day. Besides the blueberry cellars, the road on the fringes of the exclusion zone surrounding Chernobyl feels much busier than it did when I first came here with Sergey a couple of years ago. There's a girl in high heels, tottering along the verge, chatting on her iPhone. A large barley field ripples in the wind, ready for harvesting. A young Couple shoot bias on a moped. This region is slowly getting back to normal, says Sergei. People are returning to farm this once booming agricultural area. It's happening inside the exclusion zone too. Chernobyl Forestry Enterprise is now planting small new pine stands, which it plans to harvest in 80 years time. But there are serious problems with the rest of Chernobyl's extensive pine plantations. Pine damages easily. Wind blows it down and insects can infest it. Drought makes brush into perfect tinder, which can all too easily catch fire. And these dying radioactive plantations are considered too dangerous and expensive to clear if ignited. One expert likens the potential effect to setting off a nuclear bomb in Eastern Europe, wind could carry radioactive smoke particles large distances, not just in Ukraine, but right across the continent. To help establish or disprove such hypotheses, Sergei has come to Chernobyl to gather data about a megafire which spread unchecked and destroyed a huge area of Scots Pine in 1992. A colleague is preparing a scientific paper on the fire's consequences, which are still largely unknown. Together, they hope to attract funding to model the danger represented by Chernobyl's forest. If they can pinpoint the most vulnerable pine stands, the next step will be to persuade the Ukrainian government and other partners to invest in training and equipment to safeguard Chernobyl's firefighters, and perhaps eventually to clear those parts of the forest which are considered to be at the most risk. Firefighters in Chernobyl have one of the least enviable jobs in the world. They spend all day up rusty Soviet watchtowers, which sway in the wind rather like tin box metronomes, and act as conductors to the huge, frightening lightning storms which swing across the land most afternoons in summer, often sparking fires. When they spot a wildfire, the firefighters work out its position by liaising with colleagues in different watchtowers. Teams jump aboard big red Soviet era fire trucks and lumber along cracked, overgrown roads to the source of the blaze. Their equipment is very basic, and although they know when they're fighting a radioactive fire, because they experience a tingling metallic sensation in their skin, their job description still belongs to heroic Soviet ideals. They must put the blaze out, no matter the personal consequences. Sergei says that more big wildfires in Chernobyl, like the one in 1992, would be catastrophic for Ukraine's image and potentially devastating for farmland across Europe. Lots of people are working on the problem, which gets worse with each new hot summer. Sergei and his colleagues need support not just to protect Chernobyl's firefighters from exposure to high doses of radiation, but also to stop the particles migrating up into the air and away wherever the wind blows them, spreading the legacy of an accident which many people think we can already safely forget.
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Program Narrator
Patrick Evans in Ukraine now some postings are clearly more challenging than others. Reporting from Washington, Paris and Rome does have its occasional frustrations, of course, but you'll certainly get on the bulletins, and you can expect a very reasonable standard of living, too. But the remoter outposts need covering as well, and on this program at least, many of the most memorable dispatches don't come from the comfortable capitals of the Western world. Thomas Hubert is now packing his bags after being our man in the Democratic Republic of Congo since 2009. Kinshasa, he tells us, may not be the easiest of postings, but it is a city he won't forget.
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Thomas Hubert
As I prepare to leave Kinshasa one last time through its notorious Njili International Airport, the memories come flooding back of the first day I landed in this city's organized chaos three and a half years ago. For a small fee, a group of extremely polite policemen protected me from an army of eager porters while I waited in the stifling baggage haul. They were toting what I would soon discover was the most commonly used crowd control tool in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the AK47 assault rifle. Some members of the force even direct traffic with one. Nowadays, Njili Airport has changed for the better. Some hardened war zone travelers, however, say that the fresh paint, the air conditioning and the baggage trolleys have meant it has lost its charm. And Kinshasa's leafy city center is now inordinately expensive. The cost of living there is higher than in Paris, but the area around the airport still makes you feel that Kinshasa is the capital of a country permanently on edge. This is where the worst violence occurred during last year's presidential election. These neighborhoods of Njili, Messina and Kimbansiki are home to most of the city's 10 to 12 million inhabitants. No one really knows how many there are. Drive through this area at night and you will see thousands of oil lamps crafted from food tins, lighting the streets. Power cuts here can last for weeks. When the Chinese contractors who are rebuilding Kinshasa's roadways are at work, creaking, minibus taxis zigzag between their diggers and end up mounting the pavements. These are second hand European vans. They find a new life after windows are cut out of their metal sides and wooden benches installed in the back. The locals here have given them a new spirit of death. The drivers themselves prefer something more positive. On their windscreens have been painted Heroic sounding Chariot of Fire, Air Force One or His Excellency. These names also tell you something about who Kinshasa's inhabitants regard as wielding real power Lawyer, original Arab son, IMF, and of course, 100% Jesus. Others are testimonies to Congolese resilience and optimism, such as Isle of Peace, My Turn to Taste Honey, and even paradise on Earth. Branching off the main airport road is a sandy track that leads to the inappropriately named City of Hope, a desolate group of hills under high tension electricity lines that have never been connected to any form of power supply. Thousands of people evicted from other areas of the city have been parked here, some for years, waiting for better accommodation. One of them, Beatrice Ngalula, told me she used to own a house on land she had bought for about $4,000. That's around £3,000. One night, policemen and soldiers came to chase her and her neighbors away, saying the land belonged to a state owned company. Corrupt civil servants had conned them into buying property that was not for sale. I used to have my own house. Now I live in a plastic bag, Ms. Ngalula told me as she pointed to the ripped sheeting covering her shack. We were given this land, but we have no documents to prove it, so it can happen all over again, she added. Such episodes are so common in Kinshasa that legitimate landowners often paint this Plot IS NOT for Sale in large letters on their wall. The phrase resonates all over the city. According to the Justice Ministry, land disputes account for 80% of court cases in the city. There is a constant air of aggression in Kinshasa. It seems to me that even the nicest people can turn nasty when they are forced to by rampant poverty and hunger. A little while ago, a policeman, after inventing the usual non descript traffic offense, pushed his way into my car to extort a few hundred Congolese francs from me, only to flash a big smile after seizing my driving license. You're Thomas. That's my son's name, he said. We're friends now. No doubt the crumpled banknotes I gave him helped feed little Thomas that night in Kinshasa. The lingala euphemism for a corrupt payment is not a kickback, not even the French expression pot of wine. It is made su yabana, which means beans for the kids, and That's Thomas Hubert.
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Program Narrator
It's 50 years today since the Algerians won independence from France. It followed a long and bitter struggle in which hundreds of thousands of people, the majority of them, Algerians were killed. There are various events, parades and so on, marking the anniversary in Algeria today. In France, the newspaper Le monde contained a 16 page supplement paid for by the Algerians looking forward to what they called a fertile new era of cooperation with France and the speculation about whether President Francois Hollande is about to issue a formal apology to the Algerians. But Philip Sweeney's wondering who else is due repentance for this painful part of French history?
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Kate Adie
For months, indeed years, observers have been wondering how Algeria would celebrate the great anniversary. The answer came in a sudden blizzard of last minute announcements, a deluge of films, colloquia and concerts, including a lavish st musical with tableaux celebrating the Evian agreements which ended the eight year war with the French military. The new French President, Francois Hollande, will not be among foreign guests clapping along, but he is believed to be keen to court Algeria and is expected to visit in September. And his attitude to that country is regarded by one sector of the French population with deep suspicion. These are the people known as the Pied Noirs, the million French men and women who used to live in Algeria and fled in 1962. Pied Noir plans for today include a counter demonstration in Perpignan at the Mur des Disparous, a monument in the grounds of a new museum to French Algeria. The Pied Noir, of course, have their own detractors. When I attended the museum opening, police cordons kept by a crowd of protesters, including local socialists and communists. For them, the Pied Noir are colonialist reactionaries. The Algerian senator and independence heroine Zohra Driff said they were, I quote, identical to Nazi nostalgics. The correct attitude of the colonial era, as far as the left is concerned, is repentance for its crimes. There's been massive exposure in recent years of the systematic French use of torture during the war and events such as the so called Paris Massacre. This was an Algerian independence demonstration violently suppressed in 1961. President Hollande has made it clear he's sympathetic to Algerian demands for a French apology for its past. The Pied Noir, however, believe they were victims of French capitulation to what they see as a terrorist organization, the fln, the Algerian National Liberation Front. They say they were consigned to forced evacuation and sometimes death, though their exodus from Algeria was scorned by the 1962 government of General de Gaulle. They're just taking their holidays early was one memorable dismissal. But today there's more and more evidence that Algerians are not the only ones owed repentance. One of the Many books out this year by the historian Jean Jacques Jordi analyzes the disappearances of French citizens in Algeria, especially after the Evian agreements. Hundreds were massacred by victorious mobs on July 5, 1962. Others were held in locations known to the French army, which was forbidden to intervene and murdered. I went to look at the wall of the disappeared in Perpignan. A long plaque of cast bronze names. A couple of elderly women were leaving in tears. A man was moving his fingers intently over the raised letters. Friends from my village, he said. Six of them, their bodies were found under a dung heap months later, over lunch. Stuffed squid for 600. I heard of other losses. Parents, uncles, family homes, limbs. Nicole Guiraud, an artist, lost an arm at the age of 10 in the destruction of the Algiers Milk Bar in 1956, courtesy of a bomb planted by the independence heroine and senator Zohra Driff. The fate of the Hakis Algerians who fought with the French against the FLN plumbed greater depths of horror. Following the Evian Accords, they were disarmed and left behind by the departing French army. Accounts of the resultant months of slaughter by public throat cutting and more imaginative vengeance make sickening reading. But in spite of all this, the Pied Noir remain objects of distaste to liberal metropolitan France. They bracketed with the oas, the terrorist organization which, with assassinations and bombings, tried to keep Algeria French. And the current support by many for the Front national, the bete noire of the intelligentsia, puts them further beyond the pale. The generation now controlling newspapers and broadcasting grew up in the 60s, with Maoist chic ruling at the Sorbonne and Jean Paul Sartre preaching anti colonialist revolution from a cafe table on the Boulevard St. Germain. But there are signs that attitudes could be changing. Another recent publication, much talked about, is an issue of Les Temps Moderne, the magazine founded by Sartre devoted to the betrayal of the Harkies. Perhaps what's infuriating the Pied Noire is the fear that before this change can take hold, their one time enemies, the fln, still in power in Algiers, may finally obtain the repentance they crave from France and without any need to account for their own crimes in that former French province 50 years ago.
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Program Narrator
Philip Sweeney the vast and inhospitable Atacama Desert in Chile may be best known here as the setting for that drama. In 2010, when more than 30 miners were trapped underground, they were mining copper ore. But for 200 years, mining companies were busy here, bringing raw nitrate to the surface. This white gold, as it was called was used for fertiliser. Some 200 towns sprang up to accommodate the miners and their families. But then, in the early 20th century, along came artificial nitrate. And as Pauline Davis has been finding out, the mining boom turned into a slump and entire settlements were abandoned.
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Pauline Davis
I was in the northern Atacama with a small group of scientists and a driver from the University of the coastal city of Antofagasta. We were looking for telltale signs of microbes clinging to life in the harshest conditions on the planet. In some parts of the Atacama desert, it has never been known to rain. And it's so dry that the core of the Atacama is often compared to the surface of Mars. Apart from human activity, there are no obvious signs of anything living. No birds, no plants, no reptiles, nor insects. In fact, the only known indigenous life consists of bacteria that amazingly, live inside mounds of salt. But the dryness that makes the Atacama a magnet for astrobiologists also preserves some of the minerals that for two centuries have driven Chile's economy. And the region continues to be mined on a vast scale these days, mainly for copper and lithium, though still some nitrate lorries continuously stream along the sealed highways and flats. Salted roads going to and from the mines and tire tracks conspicuously crisscrossed the landscape. But the only people we encountered on foot were other scientists studying the unique soils. Nitrate mines once dotted the desert and they needed armies of workers. Young men were lured to the mines with the promise of fun, wealth and success. But when they arrived, they were trapped, often paid with tokens that could only be used in the company stores built in the middle of nowhere. Yet these remote settlements rapidly turned into bustling townships, complete with family homes and modern amenities. Today, most of the old mining towns have disappeared, their former existence betrayed only by ramshackle graveyards in the sand. Poignant reminders that entire families of men, women and children spent their lives in this inhospitable landscape. And sadly, buried somewhere in this vast wilderness lie the bodies of political prisoners murdered during the Pinochet dictatorship that lasted for 17 years from 1973. I was inspecting one forlorn and ruined town when a car drew up and out stepped a sprightly 95 year old named Clara with her family. She was born in this desolate place and had come back to reminisce and show the walls of her small former home to her nine year old great grandson. In spite of the isolation, she had loved living there. Everyone felt safe. Food was abundant in the company stores and the work didn't seem that hard, she said. Clara left the desert when she was still a child and grew up to become a prolific poet. She recited some of her work to me, standing beside the crumbling remains of her birthplace. A few ghost towns have been preserved almost intact. The Chacabuco is one. It's now a national monument, guarded by a solitary watchman and his two dogs. We came across it after dark and didn't expect to get in. But after a couple of phone calls, Jose, the watchman, unlocked the gates. Grasping torches, we stumbled through the eerie streets and buildings once home to 5,000 people. There were schools, a hospital, a church, a soccer field, a swimming pool, and even trees and gardens, rare splashes of green amid the boundless reds and pale browns of the desert. The jewel in the crown of Chacabuco is its splendid, ornate theater, still intact and now serving as a museum. In the town's heyday, performers came from far and wide to provide entertainment. Even the great Enrico Caruso once sang there. Today, miners and their families mostly live in ordinary towns on the edge of the desert. But Jose said there is nowhere else he would rather be than Chacabuco. And standing in the darkness on the roof of the abandoned theater, watching a great orange moon rising majestically over the vast desert landscape, I could for just a brief moment, see what he meant.
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Program Narrator
And with that, from Pauline Davis in a ghost town in Chile's Atacama Desert, we've reached the end of another edition. I'll be here on Saturday with more from correspondents around the world. I hope you'll join us. Goodbye.