← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
June 18, 2011
00:27:50
The ultimate failed state. That's what some call Somalia in the Horn of Africa.
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You're listening to from our own correspondent from the BBC. You can also hear the World Service edition of the programme on the BBC iPlayer.
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But this is the latest program from Radio 4, introduced by Kate Ady Today. Why thousands of people are pouring into Mogadishu, the Somali city reckoned by some to be the most dangerous place on earth. There's an awkward encounter in Shanghai with a visiting country cousin. Economic boom arrives in Poland, wherein the port, they say, will be the Dubai of the Baltic. And mountaineering's Ms. Marple, the woman who keeps climbers roped to the truth on Mount Everest. Somalia, in the Horn of Africa, is the ultimate failed state, a land of war, banditry and piracy. This week, at least 12 people were killed in a pitched battle there between the Islamist rebel group Al Shabaab and pro government militiamen. Al Shabaab, which is linked to Al Qaeda, now controls large areas of the country. It's pledged to overthrow the fragile government in the capital, Mogadishu. Peter Gresta, who's just back from there, says it isn't just lawlessness and violence which Somalis have to contend with. There's also a serious drought which has caused crop failures, a shortage of food and has resulted in urgent appeals for aid.
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The mayor of Mogadishu insists his city isn't the most dangerous place in the world. It's in fact, Mohammad Nur reckons it isn't as bad as Kabul or even Baghdad. Of course, it's not as safe as we'd like it to be, he told me, but we are making progress. Calling it safe might be a stretch. The mayor has a street lighting program. I know because I saw the lights flicker on the only three blocks he's done as we drove past in an armoured troop carrier. His council is also collecting rubbish and opening new markets. I'll have to take his word for those initiatives, though our minders, from a force of African Union troops earnestly shook their heads when I asked if we could see them. What if we followed the mayor for a while? I suggested. He's got his own heavily armed bodyguards, after all. No, came the reply. Still too dangerous. Can we walk the hundred metres between the Ministry of Information and the Prime Minister's office then? Not without flak jackets and an armoured vehicle. The rattle, pop and thump of gunfire is is so pervasive that locals grimly call it Mogadishu music. I lost count of the number of times bullets zipped past like angry lead hornets. All that flying metal has chewed away the buildings so that vast districts now look like Stalingrad after its siege in World War II. Except that back then they had heavy bombs and artillery to help with the work. In Mogadishu, they've shredded the city with small arms. The Somali government can barely count the dead, never mind run the country. Credible estimates reckon 20 years of war has cost a million lives. The country is haemorrhaging around 10,000 refugees a month. And how do those who are left manage to survive? I asked Mariam Ahmed, a forlorn 37 year old mother of seven who once dreamed of becoming a teacher. We don't survive, she told me from behind exhausted eyes. We exist. Marion belongs to an underclass of urban nomads. People who've stripped their lives to a few precious pots and clothes they can sling in a blanket and run with whenever the front lines shift. She lost her husband two years ago, and I mean lost him. When Mariam and her children fled from the advancing front, he promised to follow with a few more possessions. She hasn't seen him since. Now they compete with a million or so others to exist in the Mogadishu. So why don't Mogadishu's wretched inhabitants simply run from this hell on earth? Paradoxically, they're pouring in. Rural people struggling with the worst drought in living memory are being forced to make a desperate choice. Risk a slow death by starvation in the countryside or lured by a meal from an aid agency, a quick one. Amid the violence of the city, hundreds of thousands are opting for the city. So how did Somali get into this state? A force of radical Islamists called Al Shabaab is fighting to overthrow what passes for the government. Al Shabaab has close ties to Al Qaeda. It has a ready supply of arms and ammunition and it's already grabbed half the country. The lack of any functioning state has allowed piracy to flourish. And the politicians who call themselves the government are fighting to hold on to their half of Mogadishu. They simply couldn't survive without 8,000 African Union troops holding the rebels back. MI5 believes it's only a matter of time before Al Shabaab takes its war to the west. Now, if you believe the African Union, the Somali government and their Western sponsors, things are more or less under control. Al Shabaab is gradually weakening. Humanitarian access is opening up and the government's influence is expanding. But the view from Mariam's hovel looks very different. Al Shabaab can and does operate almost at will. Across the city, no place is safe. The only humanitarian aid is one bowl of maize porridge a day for her and the kids, and she's too afraid to say what she really thinks of the government and its politicians. If there was a force of radical Islamists who've declared an interest in attacking the west and a humanitarian crisis threatening hundreds of thousands of people anywhere else, there'd be benefit rock concerts and emergency talks at the United Nations. But not here. This is a slow burner, a cancer that's quietly grown over two decades in a place the rest of the world doesn't seem to care about, except when Somali pirates prevent them from sailing their
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ships safely past Peter Gresta. And you can see a film he's made in Somalia on Monday evening's Panorama. That's at 8:30 on BBC One. People are also on the move in huge numbers in China in recent years. Hundreds of millions have left rural areas in search of a better life in the fast developing cities. It's become a major problem for the authorities, who've put in place a series of measures to try to control internal migration. Yet still they come a mass movement of people which is causing tensions between the town and country dwellers, as Juliana Liu's been finding out in Shanghai.
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I see him on the corner of Shanxi Road, near Shanghai's main domestic airport. It's been more than 20 years, but I recognize my cousin Shenjun instantly. The same floppy hair, the same moonlike face with eyes that narrow into happy slivers. And most importantly, the same voice in a familiar Hunan accent calling out Xiaomao or little hairy head, the nickname of my childhood. We Chinese rarely hug, at least not each other, so Shenzhun and I clasp hands in greeting. Then he introduces a woman standing nearby wearing a fashionable black Adidas tracksuit. This is Cao Cao, your sister in law, he says. Hellos exchanged. Shenjun and Cao Cao take me to a nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken. Kendeji, as it's called in China, is the country's favorite fast food chain. It arrived on the mainland in 1987, the same year I left. Since then, it's become an aspirational middle class hangout, a popular place for first dates and, for me now, family reunions. Shenjun and Cao Cao tell me they've lived in Shanghai on and off for years, working as migrant laborers. He is a security guard at a posh residential compound. She works at a supermarket. They each make less than £200amonth. It's an absolute fortune in the countryside where they come from. But here in Shanghai, China's most fashionable and westernized city, it doesn't go very far. That explains why we're meeting at KFC instead of at their home, a tiny space of just a few square meters with no air conditioning or heating. The Chinese value face more than anything, even money. My seeing their modest dwelling would have meant loss of face. After ordering, we exchange family gossip. One of our cousins seems to be doing well as a salesman. Another is looking for a job. The conversation is awkward. Even though I still speak the dialect of rural Hunan, where Shenzhun was born and raised and where I spent part of my childhood, it's difficult to bridge the enormous gap that exists between us. My cousin is barely scraping by in a city that places migrant workers at the bottom of its social ladder, while I'm living a life of international opportunity that few Chinese would have been able to fathom just two decades ago. That's because in the 1980s, my father seized the window provided by China's Reform and Opening to learn English and emigrate. Xinjun's father, my uncle, stayed on at the family farm planting rice as our ancestors had. For Gener, my cousin was not educated beyond his early teenage years. In today's China, a lack of education and connections means a life of hard labor, either in subsistence farming or as hired muscle. And the more we talk, the more I see that many things about my cousin are no longer the same. The carefree prankster who terrorized my toddler years has become a whirl weary man juggling life as a migrant worker and absentee father. He married Yang to a local girl. They had a son. Then, as waves of ambitious people had done before him, Shenjun left for booming Guangdong Province near Hong Kong to try his luck as a factory worker. The distance contributed to his divorce. He met his current wife, who is from a different part of China, whilst working. It's a modern migrant marriage, and they seem happy with each other. Cao Cao jokes that Shenjun isn't clever or lucky enough to get rich. He smiles in response, saying one's life is determined by heaven, that it's pre written and impossible to change. But for all his fatalism, Shenjun is determined to ensure that his son Wen Long doesn't follow in his footsteps. Sounding very much like a guilt ridden working mother. My cousin says it's impossible to make a living in the city as well as take care of matters at home, which is a day's journey away. That's because even though Shenjun and Cao Cao work in Shanghai, they're considered rural residents under China's archaic household registration system. It bars them from Social services, including healthcare and education in Shanghai. So like almost all the children of migrant workers, Wen Long is being raised in the countryside by his grandparents who are too old and too soft for discipline. He gets poor grades in school and seems destined for a life of manual labor. All too soon. It gets late and Shenzhun must start another night shift guarding the homes of rich locals and foreigners. I insist on giving them a ride by cab. But proud as they are, Shenjun and Cao Cao insist on going back by bicycle the way they came.
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That's Juliana Liu. When Germany signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with Poland 20 years ago this week, it wasn't an alliance of equals. On one side of a border drawn by Stalin at the end of the Second World War was a reunified global power. On the other, an impoverished nation still weighed down by its communist past. But times have definitely changed for the Poles. They are flexing their economic muscles across Europe and are no longer willing to be seen as the poor relations. Paul Henley's travelled from Berlin across what was East Germany and on to Poland to take a fresh look at east west relations.
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The summer after I left school I remember doing an uneasy closed mouthed breaststroke between duck turds to towards the middle of a lake and a line of barbed wire and Achtung notices beyond which was communism from my capitalist lake half I'm sure. I stared with smug excitement at the blank faces of the armed guards on the wall beyond who were so bored they barely noticed me and I probably tried to imagine their undemocratic lives behind the Iron Curtain of history lessons and 9 o' clock news reports. I wrote long letters home about the impossible glamour and of living and working on the right side of Berlin's famous graffiti covered concrete slabs, drinking green tinted beer out of bowls and going to improvised plays performed by naked anarchists who lived in squats. I exchanged a few West German marks for East German ones and crossed on a day visa to see actual communist people in their own habitat. I could afford to drink Russian champagne in the opera house on Unter den Linden. Michael was in Berlin too that summer in the east, working as a welder and living in a one room apartment allocated by the DDR authorities. He'd just finished three years of military service and while I was spending small change on Eastern Bloc trinkets, he was saving up the equivalent of a month's wage to buy on the black market a 5Lp box set of Bruce Springsteen live. He's still got it. Michael is the same age as me and these days he he's my colleague. We took turns driving from Berlin this week across wooded East German countryside I wasn't allowed in as a teenager. And where he spent summer holidays in a dacha abandoned by people who ran from the Red army at the end of the last war. Life got better quite fast for Michael after the wall came down. He ended up moving into leafy West Berlin and now has a balcony nearly as big as my whole flat in not so leafy inner London. Not all his compatriots had such good fortune. We drove deeper into the former communist east, through the backwaters of the state of Mecklenburg Vorpommen, with its shabby cowsheds, closed down pubs and empty storks nests. And it wasn't Shangri La. There are precious few ways to earn a living there, and half the younger generation shifted west like Michael did. We might not be lucky. Many locals have thought not so secretly for decades now. But at least we don't come from Poland nowadays. They're out of date. The Poles shook off communism too. They were the first to do it, actually. But when they started to venture out in search of a better income, it was a case of beggars couldn't be choosers. The day Poland joined the European Union in May 2004, I spent with an English teacher called Piotr from Wrocaw as he packed his bags and left his family and his career for a bricklaying contract in Peterborough. He's back home now, and when Germany officially decided to allow the Poles in to work only last month, neither he nor any of his friends was at all tempted. In the German market town of Lucknitz, a couple of hours northeast of Berlin near the Baltic Sea, I did meet some Poles this week. Dariush is the sharp suited owner of a small factory that mixes spices for export and employs four German workers. Several of his Polish friends have bought houses on the German side of the border because they're cheaper and commute to Poland to better paid jobs. And in the city of Szczecin, 20 minutes into Poland, I saw the boom really getting going. There are construction sites everywhere. They're building a concert hall, museums, business parks, office complexes and a marina. The PR woman at the city hall described the place as the future Dubai and Sydney of the Baltic. Some of the ornate but battered Hanseatic facades of the buildings in the center of town are getting a facelift. They're not there yet, but Michael says the faded glamour of the streets looks just like parts of East Berlin he used to know before. They did them up and they got trendy students in Stecin, meet in cafes that look like Ikea catalogues and talk about how, unlike their older brothers and sisters, they see their future in their home city and not abroad. Severin, a multilingual preppy 19 year old who's studying international law, told me Poland was finally getting the confidence to take its rightful place at the center of Europe, an example of where you get by working hard. He said his country would be a beacon for the neighbors. Poor old Belarus. It probably isn't how he'd choose to calibrate Poland's great leap forward. But although Severin from Szczecin might not be quite the smug teenager I was when I swam across that lake in 1985 and gawped at communist deprivation, he's getting there.
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Paul Henley Parts of the southern United States are in the grip of the worst drought they've seen in nearly 50 years. Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado have all been hit hard, but it's the Lone Star state of Texas where the lack of rain is causing most concern. The Texan economy is built on oil and agriculture, and both are suffering. Some oil extraction there requires huge amounts of water, so production has been cut back in the fields. It's being forecast that wheat harvests will be well down, and ranchers struggling to afford feed for their cattle are cutting back the size of their herds. Johnny diamond says times may be hard, but some Texans are putting a brave face on it.
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The rancher was 80 years old but moved as if he was 60, 65. He was well weighted at the front, but his legs were strong and quick still, his hand rough and firm on the handshake. He wore, of course, a cowboy hat, the kind you see everywhere in rural Texas, the kind that keeps the sun out of your eyes, the kind that no one looks twice at. Straw coloured, a wide brim, a dip in the middle of the crown, a around which a black band wound. A grey green rancher's shirt with flaps and folds good for the roaring sun, pulled snugly over a belly that spoke of many decent meals and tucked neatly into tight jeans. Pushing the pickup truck's pedals were cowboy boots, dark and shiny brown, delicately embroidered with fancy patterns and stamped with the brand of his ranch. The pickup was dusty. It pitched and yawed in and over ditches and ridges in the hard, hot ground of the ranch. The grass was brittle brown, the ponds that once held water empty bowls of weeds, newly sown fields now flat spaces full of dead seeds. Drought has come to Texas, a calamitous dry winter following hard on the heels of three or four bad years. As he twisted the wheel, he pointed out the history of the land. His great grandfather had sown a field of cotton in the first year of America's Civil War, down by the water where the crop was washed away by the first of many floods. He laughed at his forebears foolishness, at lessons learned about the weather, and then forgotten. He'd sold more than half his cattle this year rather than pay for feed. Other ranchers in the area were selling up completely. Two years before, he'd sold the lot, then bought back expecting rain. I gambled, he said, and I lost. As for the drought now, well, if it went on much longer, he'd have to sell again. But it wasn't the longest he'd known. That was back in the 50s, when seven years of drought ravaged the land. In the central black lands of Texas, the fields are cracked corn that should be blocking the line of sight from farm to farm hovers spindly at waist height. If there was a harvest, it would fetch a small fortune with corn prices at record highs. But instead farmers are trying to work out when and whether to plow their crop back into their land and how they will buy the seed to sow next year. Years ago, the rancher held agricultural office in the state. Texas was built on cattle and oil, lumber and cotton. Things have changed a lot since then. Now a new Silicon Valley rises from what was once the hardscrabble Hill country where former President Lyndon Baines Johnson was born and raised. The state sucks in people and jobs. Attracted by the low taxes, small government, year round sunshine, and Texas spirit, the rancher ruminated on those. He'd met President Johnson. He'd bought young bulls from a slick crook he called him, but someone who would one day be more appreciated for his time in office. George Bush senior. George Bush Jr. He too, the rancher said, would one day be seen as one of the great presidents. The pickup wound its way back to the rancher's house. Low hanging branches scraped the cab. Inside, two hunting rifles bulged from their straps on the roof. One of them was made for him by friends. I like rifles, he chuckled. The rancher chuckled a lot. Back in the cool of his house, he pointed out the skin of the hundred and fifty pound black bear he'd shot, splayed out in front of his cowhide covered bed. On the floor of the living room, the skin of a zebra he had similarly dispatched. Beyond Texas borders, an anguished debate over national decline rumbles on. There's less of that within the Lone Star State, anguish or debate alongside the huge highways that have tamed this enormous place, vast American flags billow in front of car dealerships, hotels, fast food restaurants. Doubt is not a Texan virtue. Everybody looks back to the good old days, said the rancher, leaning back in an armchair, a cold drink in his hand. But I don't want to go back there. They weren't so good. He went back out into the sun, now near its peak, to say goodbye. The cicadas shrieked in the tree above the countryside drained of colour by the hard sunlight. This is a great country, he said. It's got its problems, but I wouldn't trade it for any other place. His big dog, T Bone, lolled and rolled in the heat, and the rancher finished the discussion. I'm proud, he said, to be an American.
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Johnny diamond in Texas A contacts book was once an essential part of every foreign correspondent's kit. Today the contacts are as important as ever. But of course they're more likely to be contained within a BlackBerry than a battered address book. In Nepal, one's contacts may have to deal with quite specialized questions. How do we know, for example, when a mountaineer has reached the summit of a mountain, especially if there's no witness, photo or video? Joanna Jolly in Kathmandu has been finding out that when you need answers to questions like these, there's one perhaps rather surprising individual you can turn to.
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A few weeks ago I received a late night call from an agitated mountaineer. Lacba Gelu. Sherpa told me he was calling because his world record for speed climbing Mount Everest was being contested by another Sherpa. According to Lackbar, this other Sherpa claimed to have shaved two hours off the record, but Lackbar said he didn't believe him. Having lived in Kathmandu for almost two years, my response to Lacba's dilemma was easy. I simply asked him, what does Ms. Hawley think? I hadn't heard of Elizabeth Hawley, or Ms. Hawley, as she's known here, before moving to Nepal, but I now recognise that this 87 year old woman is is as famous within the Nepali climbing world as any of the mountaineers. Originally from America, Ms. Hawley has become the official chronicler of all Himalayan climbs for a US Run database. From her small apartment, set back from the chaos of a Kathmandu street, she meticulously gathers information on every expedition that comes to Nepal. With a keen eye for detail, a nose for the facts and a reputation for being ferocious, Ms. Hawley has become the unofficial adjudicator of who actually made it to the top. And who didn't? She is the Miss Marple of the climbing world. I first met Ms. Hawley a year ago when I was reporting on the disputed climb of a Korean mountaineer. Sitting in armchairs in her book filled office, we discussed the climb and life in general. I was curious to know how a little old lady in a twinset and neat skirt had ended up becoming the world's foremost authority on Himalayan climbing. Elizabeth, who was born in Chicago in 1923, told me she'd always had an eye for the facts. While she was at university in Michigan, she heard the radio broadcast about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Her dorm mates, she told me, all came running to her wanting to know where Honolulu was. After university, Elizabeth took a job as a researcher at Fortune magazine in New York. She worked on the 49th floor of the Empire State Building and described to me the sight of ocean liners being tugged into the Hudson river far below. Her job involved working in what was called the magazine's morgue, a cavernous room that housed all the cuttings and research papers. Accuracy was banged into me at Fortune, she told me. Being sloppy is dreadful, she added. It's not only immoral, but misleading. You ought to get fired for it. Always curious, Elizabeth used her salary in her holidays to tour the world. Her inspiration was the British explorer and Arabist Gertrude Bell, who'd helped draw up the borders of modern Iraq 30 years before. In 1955, while back at Fortune, she read an article about tourists being allowed into Kathmandu for the first time. She filed the information away in her head and knew at some point she'd go there. Her chance came four years later. She'd been in Delhi, visiting the offices of Time magazine when she was asked to go to Kathmandu to report on elections there. Elizabeth never saw herself as a writer, saying she didn't really have the vocabulary for the job. But she leapt at the opportunity. Armed with a portable typewriter, she spent a few weeks investigating Nepali palace intrigue and politics. It was enough to make up her mind to move to Kathmandu permanently. I thought it would be very interesting to stay three or four years to watch Nepal come out of its shell and cope with the 20th century, she told me. But those few years spread out into a lifetime as Elizabeth worked her way through a number of jobs. Correspondent for Time magazine, Reuters reporter, travel agent, and even becoming the honorary New Zealand consul. But it was to mountaineering that she always returned. With her love of fact finding and investigation, she became the living institutional memory of all Himalayan climes. So what of Lackbar and his record? I visited Elizabeth again to ask whether she thought the other Sherpa was telling the truth. I don't believe so, she told me. His climb was far too fast and no one saw him on the mountain. And anyway, she added, that other Sherpa's gone to jail for extortion, so he's not a credible person. As I stood up to leave, I I asked her whether, after all these years, she saw herself as a detective. She paused for a while and then nodded. Yes, I guess so, she said. I do like loose ends to be tied up.
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Joanna Jolly there with the Miss Marple of the Himalayas, bringing today's programme to a close. Two new additions next week on Thursday and on Saturday mornings. Do join us. Goodbye.