← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Jan 29, 2011
00:28:13
Spectacular political developments across the Arab world as viewed from the Corniche a...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC.
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This is from our own correspondent.
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You can hear the version of the programme broadcast on the World Service by following the link to the iplayer on the top of our website. To keep up with our latest reports and get a sneak preview of the stories, you can sign up to our
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Twitter feed as well.
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But now, with the addition Broadcast on Radio 4, here's Kate Ady.
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Pictures of an execution how video of a stonings fuel the debate over law and order in Afghanistan. A remote village in India where micro credit has brought ruin and despair. An Eiffel Tower there is but no Moulin Rouge. That's in a place called Paris in Belarus. And from the chaotic streets of Dakar, a crash course in how to get streetwise in Senegal. But first, the newly appointed Lebanese Prime Minister, the Billionaire businessman Najib McCarthy is meeting the country's president this morning. The briefing comes after two days of talks hosted by Mr. McCarty, aimed at forming a new government. Observers say the new premier, who is backed by the militant Hezbollah movement, has failed to convince the Western backed former Prime Minister Saad Hariri to join his administration. Kevin Connolly has been covering the talks, which of course have been going on against a backdrop of spectacular political unrest in Cairo and other parts of the Arab world.
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Sometimes it can be hard to judge when things are moving and when they're not. Stand with your back to the city of Beirut and stare out into the dull blue waters of the eastern Mediterranean, and some trick of the light makes it appear that the great container ships on the horizon are utterly still. They're not, of course, turn away for a moment to marvel at the way Beirut sits untidily on a narrow slip of land between the mountains and the sea, like old jewellery piled onto a shelf. When you turn back, the ship will have moved on, but will appear to be still again, so some sorts of change are easier to see and measure than others. There are soldiers at the end of the driveway of my modest tourist hotel, for example, who are noticeably more relaxed at the end of this week of political upheaval in Lebanon than they were at the start. They are not guarding the hotel itself, but a military installation tucked away behind it, an incongruous piece of what passes for town planning here. Nothing could stand out more glaringly against our white painted walls than the tangle of camouflage webbing which is meant to make their sentry box invisible. A little way down the elegant curve of the corniche stands a Phoenician lighthouse, one of the few remaining traces of the great trading civilisation of the ancient world, which slowly dwindled in importance in the last centuries before the birth of Christ. The Phoenicians in some ways are rather unlucky to be remembered as the forgotten civilization of the ancient world. Their explorers once managed to circumnavigate Africa, one of history's great feats of navigation. But because their account of the rising and setting of the sun as seen from the southern hemisphere seemed so implausible, no one believed them. Part of their wealth was based on exporting a purple dye to Greece, where it was used for dyeing the robes of a fashion conscious elite. But eventually the snails from whose crushed shells the dye was made became extinct. You wonder if they foresaw the collapse that would flow from that one apparently minor change. It's been that way in Lebanese politics this week too. On the face of it, the country's complex political machinery creaked into action and delivered a new prime minister to replace Saad Hariri, whose government collapsed in acrimony a few weeks back. The rules, of course, have to be complex to reflect the patchwork of ethnic and religious groups which which are bound together here by a rather fragile set of working agreements. The President has to be a Marillaj Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of the National Parliament, a member of the Shiite community. So the small, visible change involved the replacement of one Sunni prime minister, Saad Hariri, with another, Najib Mikati. The larger change it betokened was the steady rise in power of Hezbollah, the heavily armed and socially active Shiite movement whose power as a state within a state has long thrown a shadow across conventional politics in Lebanon. It backs the personally moderate Mr. McCarthy. America regards Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, plain and simple, and it almost certainly outguns the army of the Lebanese state itself. It has the powerful backing of Iran. And because it is strongest down towards the edgy southern frontier where Lebanon meets the state of Israel, many Israelis now feel they effectively share a border with their implacable Iranian enemies. It is a remarkable outcome to a political crisis which was triggered when Hezbollah walked out of the previous government because an international tribunal was apparently about to accuse some of its senior members of involvement in the murder in 2005 of Rafi Kore, Prime Minister at the time. He was, of course, the father of Sa? Har T Hariri, the loser in this latest power struggle. For a day there was a sense of tension here and there were protests in the areas where support for the Hariri family is strongest. But in the end, the anger abated, at least for now. Perhaps that is because even as the jigsaw pieces of the Lebanese constitution were being cautiously reassembled into a new pattern, all eyes in the Arab world which had been on Tunis, began to turn to Cairo. I sat in a Beirut cafe where, through curling wisps of sweet smoke from gurgling shisha pipes, affluent Lebanese watched the satellite pictures from Egypt. It is, of course, another sign of change. But for the moment, no one really knows how much lasting change will flow from it in the Arab world, with its huge and growing population of young people. It feels like an exciting prospect to the democratic governments of the west, which have allowed themselves to feel very comfortable with essentially non democratic governments in places like Egypt. It must feel like a complex and unwelcome challenge. The darker aspects of those regimes are always overlooked on the grounds that they at least promised a kind of stability. Now they don't necessarily promise even that. And the unpredictable voices calling for democracy from the street can hardly be ignored. It is always hard to measure change and movement and to understand it, even when it's happening right in front of your eyes, as those of us watching the shipping lanes out on the eastern Mediterranean could tell you.
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Kevin Connolly Afghan officials say they'll bring to justice the men who stoned a couple to death in the north of the country. The Taliban have defended the killing. Stoning, they say, is permitted under Islamic law. NATO's senior civilian representative there insists the Afghan government needs to improve the rule of law in the country. Quintin Somerville in Kabul points out that in many parts of Afghanistan, people don't trust the government courts and prefer Taliban justice.
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Siddiqa was a 25 year old Afghan woman who fell in love with Khayyam, a 28 year old man. They lived in a remote village, Mulakil, in the very north of the country. The Taliban controlled the district. Their love was forbidden. Khayyam was already married, but he could take more wives. Siddiqa, however, was engaged to another man. When her family heard of the affair, they demanded it end. Their daughter had brought shame on them, they said. Fearing for their lives, the couple eloped to Pakistan. This all took place last year, but the pair were lured back under the false promise they wouldn't be harmed and they were then killed. The story has come back because video footage has appeared of the last minutes of their lives. A bright summer's morning when the men of the village gathered under the gaze of Taliban fighters for the stoning. It's terrible to watch recorded on a mobile phone. It begins with Siddiqua standing in a hole up to her waist. She's covered in a blue burqa. We never see her face, as rocks bigger than a man's fist smash into her. She attempts to crawl from the hole. She doesn't make it, but is still alive even after a boulder is thrown at her head. The mullahs and the Taleb fighter begin to argue. Should she be left alone or should she be shot? The fighter steps forward with his AK 47. Three quick shots. Siddhika is dead. The hole where she stood is now her grave. Khayyam is next. His face we see. Handsome, he appeals, unafraid. He looks around. Is he looking for Siddiqua? Or is he looking into the eyes of the men who are about to kill him? Even at the end, the couple refuse to renounce their love for each other. As the stones hit him, he's heard crying. Then silence. I must have viewed the 9 minute long video more than a dozen times. We edited the pictures and sound to show what we could. They never lose their awful power. Some are unforgettable. The fighter holding two large rocks clicks them together for the camera, a wide grin on his face. Or at the end, when the lovers lay dead, the hundreds of men around casually get up and leave to carry on with the rest of their day. This kind of violence brought the Taliban international notoriety. When they held power in the late 90s, there were public executions in the Kabul sports stadium and elsewhere, an extreme interpretation of Sharia law, swift and bloody justice. I showed the film to a leading Afghan human rights campaigner. It takes me back to those times, he said with a shudder, and it makes me think, what if they come back? It was too much for him. We had to cut the interview short. But he made the point that the Taliban carried out this killing at a time when Afghanistan, Pakistan's foreign partners, America, Britain and their allies were talking about when they would leave the country. This was a reminder from the insurgents of what might happen if they are left undefeated. Siddiqua's family, we believe, went to the Taliban voluntarily, and in many parts of the country, people still do. The government's courts are corrupt, bribery is common, the Taliban don't ask for money, and their sentencing is quick. So often Taliban courts are trusted by more than government courts. Diplomats in Kabul recognize the danger here. This weakness of the official rule of law could lose the war, they say. Ridding the country of the Taliban is one thing, but building a government the people can trust is another. One Western diplomat told me it's the biggest challenge facing President Karzai's government. No one has been charged with Siddiqa and Qayyam's killing. The authorities said they couldn't go near the village as it's still under Taliban control. On a cold Kabul evening, I sat in the home of the police commander for the north of the country, General Daoud. In front of a roaring fire, he watched the footage for the first time. This wasn't Sharia law, he said. This wasn't Afghan law. As a man and a human being, he said he felt ashamed that this had happened. The killers would be brought to justice. The tape was evidence, he said. The UN and others believe this is the first public stoning since the Taliban lost power, certainly the first documented case. The killers are easily identifiable. Most don't hide their faces. After nine years of fighting, the Taliban remain confident and they still have the power to turn the clock back.
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That was Quentin Somerville in Kabul. India's Central bank has recommended action be taken to regulate the country's crisis ridden micro finance companies. Microfinance was designed to offer small, cheap loans to poorer borrowers, often in rural areas. The trouble began last year when the authorities blamed it for a string of suicides in remote villages. Before long, the multi billion pound industry was on the brink of a mass default. Nearly half the loans had been taken out by households in the eastern state of Andhra Pradesh. Madeleine Morris has been there to investigate a facility once hailed as a solution to global poverty.
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I doubt many people visiting a village of Dalits who used to be known as Untouchables in rural India have ever had a sign welcoming them in English and the local language Telugu. But then again, I doubt many outsiders have ever been to the village of Mmpuram in rural Andhra Pradesh. Hearty welcome, a special team from London arriving on behalf of BBC to make a documentary under the leadership of Mr. Leo Hornack, boomed the sign strung between two trees. My producer Leo, burst with pride and bemusement. I was proud too. We'd worked for a month to get access to this village and we were finally going to be able to meet some of the people who'd become so mired in debt. As the truck carrying us rolled in, our guide, Mr. Prabhadas, who manages a long established company offering small loans, began to introduce us to some of the women. It was his organisation that had conducted a survey and found out that on average, the Dalit women in this village each have four, five different microloans. When the microcredit boom began here about a Decade ago, companies piled in. They signed up women who were eager for the money, officially to put into businesses, but also sometimes, often just to help get by. Now the average debt for a Dalit woman in this village is about £1,000. The average daily household wage about £1 80. The cement two roomed houses were neatly arranged in a grid painted colourfully in the traditional Indian way. As is often the case in India, the brightness of the women's saris and the children's clothes seems in contrast to their obvious poverty. Making our way through the coconut tree lined alleys, women kept grabbing our hands, beckoning us into their homes. Time was short so we could only visit a few. And that's how I met Lakshmi. Dressed in a midnight blue sari with her hair bound into a plait at the back of her neck, she took me in through her tiny courtyard, then sat me on her wooden framed bed. The holes in the tin roof had been patched up with tarpaulin, but it too looked as if it was starting to tear. I took out seven loans altogether. We still owe more than £800. She tells me we haven't saved anything in the past. We always had enough and we broke even. But now we've lost everything that we invested in agriculture after floods destroyed our crops last year. We've got all these debts. Lakshmi ends by asking if I can help pay for her medicines which cost about 80p a day. Mr. Prabhadas advises me against it and I know he's right. In a community like this, choosing to help just one person only invites trouble. After bidding Lakshmi farewell, Mr. Prabhadas takes us to the community hall to show us some of the projects his organisation has helped to get off the ground. There's a room of old fashioned foot pump iron sewing machines and the ladies, young and old, are making cotton petticoats to sell at the market. Like Lakshmi, many of these women have lost their main source of income. So Mr. Prabhadas hopes the sewing machines will help. It had taken some convincing to get him to bring us to Mmpuram. He was worried about the potential fallout of showing a negative side to the village. But a week before our arrival, he'd finally said to me on the phone, don't worry, whatever trouble comes, I will take it. Mr. Prabhadas is one of the old guard of microcredit providers. He began his organisation called Cresa in the 1970s because he says he wanted to help the rural poor to to help themselves. As microloans became more and more popular, the company expanded and when organizations like his began to change from being charities into ones which sought to make a profit so more local projects could be funded, he did that too. It seemed the way of the future. But microcredit institutions have a bad name now. In Andhra Pradesh, a spate of borough suicides prompted a government crackdown on their activities. Mr. Prabhadas perfectly clipped moustache curls down when he talks about the reckless behaviour of some companies. And besides the obvious trouble for indebted women like Lakshmi, that is the other great shame of this story. The good work of companies and charities which genuinely have tried to improve the lot of poor rural people has been tainted by the bad behaviour of a few. As we wave goodbye and head back down the bumpy dusty road past the welcome sign, I think of the other people all around the world who've fallen victim to the promise of easy money, multiple credit cards, subprime mortgages, unethical microloans in America, India, Africa. So often it's the people who can least afford it who end up paying the price.
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Madeleine Morris in India On Monday, the European Union is expected to announce new sanctions against the leadership of Belarus following a crackdown on the opposition there after December's presidential election. President Alexander Lukashenko was re elected in a poll which observers said was flawed. The crackdown has surprised Western diplomats because it comes after a two year period when the autocratic Mr. Lukashenko appeared to be opening up to the west and turning his back on his traditional allies in the Kremlin. James Kumbursamy has just been to Belarus. He travelled to the west of the country to see what impact this change in political mood is having on those Belarusians living close to the European Union border.
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It was approaching 11am and I just had my third vodka of the day. Our hostess Ala Kasich, was insistent that we drank to each other's health several times before she gave us a tour of the region. A squat woman with dark hair piled on her head, she's the deputy head of the administration in Pastavi, a town in Belarus just 20 minutes drive from the border with Lithuania, I'd come to get a sense of how the chill in relations between her country and the west since a post election crackdown was being perceived so close to the EU's frontier. Although the European Union may be physically close by, traces of this country's linguistic and political alliance with Russia are rather more evident. Look out of Allah's window on the town's main square and and you'll see a statue of Lenin Striding. Into a brave communist future. It was the last ever Lenin statue built in the Soviet Union, she explained, munching on a cold, battered piece of local fish. By chance, the morning it was placed there was the first day of the 1991 August coup. So, as a struggle was playing out in Moscow between the Soviet old guard and Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank, nervous officials in this part of the Soviet Union were wondering whether to ditch Lenin or to keep him. They kept him and he's still there today. Together with an attachment to the system he created. It's a link which emanates from the very top. President Lukashenko has kept a command economy and kept a wary eye on state employees like Alla. Her task was to show the BBC the other side of Belarus and the welcoming, open side which doesn't place political opponents in prison and regards its leader as a wise, benevolent man, not an autocrat who has been labelled Europe's last dictator. She took us to see one of the President's fans, a man who shares a certain end of regime notoriety with the Lenin statue. Oleg Volodka was a former collective farm director who was the final person to be named a Hero of Socialist Labour by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Softly spoken, with a white beard, in manner and looks, he's more like an academic than a gnarly handed farm manager. Sitting in his kitchen, he soberly sang the praises of the socialist system and assured me that President Lukashenko was a caring man. Ala sipped the local vodka that Alieg had placed on the table and smiled along. Later, she gave us a flavour of Belarus culture, taking us to a winter festival deep in the woods. There, actors in brightly coloured costumes enacted the tale of Zyuzya, the Belarusian spirit of cold. The crowd's enthusiasm for the local culture was clear, but so too was their concern that a freeze in relations could put on hold their hopes of closer economic and human ties with the outside world. In this part of Europe, where borders have frequently shifted, many families are split between countries. In Belarus, they'd like the curtain, which still exists, to be lifted. It's not quite an iron curtain anymore, but with visas, payments and trips to Minsk to sort out the bureaucracy, it is still a hard one to pull aside. Ask people here whether they feel closer to Europe or to Russia, and most will plump for Europe. The older generation, though, tend to emphasize their country's unique position. We're between Europe and Russia and always will be, one woman told me. We're a border country with a border mentality, as the day dragged on and more vodkas were drunk. Our hostess, Ala, seemed to grow more pensive. Perhaps she was worried. We had been less than enthusiastic about seeing the automatic milking machines at a local farm, which she told us were of European standards. Her boss, it transpired, was very keen for us to visit. We were more keen to see the tiny village of Paris, the Belarusian for Paris, where we interviewed Ala beneath its replica Eiffel Tower. She told us she wanted better relations with the west, but that the EU needed to be sensible and respect the will of the Belorussian people. The village was given its name, by the way, after Napoleon stayed there on his way to Moscow and declared that its surrounding hills reminded him of the outskirts of the French capital. He wouldn't have recognized the local dancing girls, though. The folk group was practicing as we arrived, dressed in white shirts and long flowery skirts, a far cry from the Moulin Rouge. But even their rousing tones couldn't cheer up Allah. Like an over insistent mother hen, she had spent the whole day feeding and watering us, toasting ties between Belarus and Western Europe along the way. And as we said our goodbyes, bloated but filled with colorful images, we thanked her for all her help. She headed back to her office, to Lenin, and doubtless to questions from her
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boss, James Kumbhra Salmi. Now, as you heard there, the correspondent doesn't usually work alone. There's often a local person alongside, helping steer them through the political and cultural complexities of a strange new society. This is, of course, particularly important when you're working somewhere far away you've never been before, where perhaps you don't even know the language. David Goldblatt was fortunate when he travelled to Senegal. His local colleague laid on a master class in how to get by in a chaotic African city.
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Reporters get the glory, producers do the work, but fixers make it happen. They find the people, make the calls, do the translating and the talking. But like Daddy, our fixer in Dakar, they do so much more. Lesson one was how to deal with rogues. On several occasions, Senegalese had said to us, as if it were a well known proverb, you know this country is full of thieves and villains. No kidding. On Rue Pompidou, the late night drag in downtown, a hundred meter walk brought us in rapid succession, a very persistent fake Chanel peddler, a man who held the shirt he was selling to too close for comfort, another who grabbed my leg claiming I was about to fall, and the crazed bonhomie of the sidewalk jester who opened with the gag you don't remember me, but we met at reception. By then we were ready to repel all borders because Daddy had shown us how it should really be done. The first rule on arrival is to change a small amount of money at the official rate and then at one's leisure. And in daylight, change more, with the street traders offering a better rate. What you don't do is change money at night outside the airport with someone you think is connected to your fixer but maybe isn't. That's what we'd done and acquired an entourage of bag carriers and advisors into the bargain. When Daddy finally appeared, she cut an imposing figure resplendent in traditional robes, Islamic prayer beads and a large, radiant orange turban and a cross look. A single glare scattered the gang as she admonished, john, my producer, have you been changing money? She shook her head in despair. Amateurs. Two minutes out of the airport, John realised he'd been shortchanged €200 and began wondering whether the BBC expenses regime would bear the loss. Daddy was having none of it. We returned to the airport, where she mobilized the police and put airport security on the job. She found the gang, persuaded one of them to spill the beans and brought the culprit to the cops. The money was returned. Daddy could pull this kind of stunt because she was sharp, brooked no nonsense, knew how things worked, and because she was connected. Lesson 2 Work those connections. Daddy relentlessly greeted old friends on the street, took new numbers from new people, used up and replenished her stock of grace and favors. Keeping it in the family is the supreme networking strategy in our short time in Dakar. We stopped at the houses of four of her relatives, eating and paying for lunch at two, showering at one and taking a siesta in another. Lesson three. Driving in Dakar is an art master. It your car is bound to have character. Ours had a dodgy starter motor, but Daddy had the knack, leaning over from the passenger seat, turning the key with just the right feel. When that didn't work, she could rustle up a crowd to bump start the thing. Once, whilst on her mobile phone, she shunted the car in front, bending our bumper and their boot. She switched to theatrical rage, swatting aside a traffic cop, the crowd of onlookers and surrounding irate drivers who had had the temerity to suggest that there was a conversation to be had at all. If there needs to be a conversation, then take note of lesson 4 Be ready to bargain. Daddy couldn't resist, of course. There was extensive discussion over the things she really intended to buy and she cut us and herself some good looking deals. But she would also haggle over the stuff she didn't want. Sets of knives, religious pamphlets and bootleg CDs, a huge brown and gold clock bearing Quranic verse. I think she did it to keep her skills sharp and to perform her civic duty keeping traders honest. Lessons one to four were about surviving, Lesson five was about thriving nowhere to eat. She took us to the midnight debitaries where we feasted on trays of roasted goat, shady gardens serving Moroccan couscous and only to the bakeries where the croissants were up to the mark. A silver tongue networker, tough minded trader, imperious queen and the Michelin guide to Dakar. Daddy was our fixer but above all she was an education and with those
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lessons for David Goldblatt we've reached the end of this edition. I'll be here with more dispatches from around the world on Thursday and Saturday of next week. Until then goodbye.