← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
June 25, 2011
00:28:07
The lights go out in the United States. It's only a simulation at present but Mark in...
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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. But this is the latest program from Radio 4, introduced by Kate Ady today.
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Future War how the US Military is Preparing for attacks from cyberspace A powder keg what Croatia's accession to the EU means for the stability of Europe. We learn how thousands now depend upon the pirate economy of Somalia and the British war dead who lie all but forgotten in the mountains of northern Italy. The United Nations Secretary General has told the government in Bahrain that those convicted this week for allegedly trying to overthrow the country's royal family should be allowed to appeal against their sentences. Eight opposition activists who had been arrested after protests against the authorities in February and March were sentenced to life in prison. Prison Hundreds of others are still awaiting trial. Rupert Wingfield Hayes watched the court proceedings in the capital, Manamah, and later was able to discuss them with a member of Bahrain's ruling family.
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Amid the continuing violent turmoil in Libya and Syria, it's easy to forget what happened on the island of Bahrain three months ago. It's certainly what the Bahraini royal family and its many friends in the Western business community would prefer. Sitting on the 52nd floor of a glistening office tower overlooking the center of Manamah this week, it's also what I was asked to do. Bahrain's royals are nothing if not charming. Over lunch of pan seared sea bream and chilled spinach soup, Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Mubarak Al Khalifa spoke wistfully of his love for Leeds Football Club and of rainy days at Ellon Road back in the 1970s, when Leeds was one of the great English clubs. The recent street protests in Bahrain were, well, unfortunate. The protesters had pushed too far, demanded too much. The country was descending into anarchy. The king, he said, had no option but to step in and restore order. The violence was regrettable, but reports of it exaggerated, and now he promised there would be a genuine dialogue with the opposition. By the end of lunch, I was starting to believe that the Western media had perhaps got it all wrong, until my mind's eye flashed back to the scene I had witnessed a few hours earlier in a military courtroom on the outskirts of Manama. I had sat and watched as 20 doctors had shuffled into the dock, their heads shaved, their clothes rumpled. Some were young, others old and grey. They couldn't squeeze enough chairs into the dock, so the young ones stood, allowing the older ones to sit. For three hours, I watched as the prosecution made its case. The doctors were it Alleged part of a militant Shia clique that had taken control of Manama's biggest hospital and used it as a base to try and overthrow the royal government. They'd spread false rumours, used ambulances to ferry weapons, including machine guns, to the street protesters. They had refused to treat patients from Bahrain's minority Sunni elite and they'd stolen blood from the blood bank. It was a strange collection of charges. The evidence against them is equally murky. The first prosecution witness, a government official, kept referring to confidential sources and to confessions made by the defendants. Confessions are always a very suspect form of evidence. Ask anybody who's experienced torture and they will tell you that everybody breaks in the end. And one of the most effective ways of making someone sign a confession is to stop them sleeping. In China, I once met a man who had confessed to killing his own wife after being kept awake by the police for 10 days and nights. His wife was alive. So what the wife of one of the doctors in Bahrain told me was all the more disturbing. In a brief meeting outside the court, her husband had told her he had been blindfolded and handcuffed and forced to stand up for three weeks. Forcing someone to stand doesn't sound like torture, but that's exactly why it is so effective. Back in my hotel room, I trawled the Internet and the BBC archive for video of the men I'd seen in the dock that morning. It didn't take long. There they were on the BBC and Al Jazeera, speaking out passionately as wounded protesters were rushed into the emergency room. Behind them, one of the doctors, a softly spoken man called Ali Al Akri, struggled to hold back tears as he pleaded with the government to stop the killing, to stop shooting the protesters. In court, the prosecutor had called Ali Al Akri the main ringleader of the doctors conspiracy. He didn't look much like a ringleader to me. Passionate, angry, distraught, yes. The leader of an anti government couple. No. His real crime appears to have been to have spoken out to us, to the foreign media, to have told the outside world what was going on inside his hospital, of the effects of buckshot and tear gas and to show X rays of high velocity bullets embedded in protesters bodies. They were images that brought shame and international opprobrium upon friendly, liberal, sophisticated Bahrain. And it is for that that the Bahrain doctors are now being punished. As the world now turns its attention to more pressing stories in Libya and Syria and beyond, there is now a real danger that the Bahrain doctors will be forgotten and that the Bahrain authorities will be quietly allowed to get on with persecuting those who dared to stand up and to speak out.
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That's Rupert Wingfield Hayes. President Obama this week told Americans their troops were coming home from Afghanistan. Over the next 15 months, 30,000 of them will be withdrawn. Meanwhile, the new CIA director, David Petraeus, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, was explaining to Americans how future battles may need to be fought in cyberspace. A team of his agents has been assessing just how much threat the country now faces from attacks launched not by conventional military hardware, but from computers. Mark Mardell in Washington says the possibility is being taken very seriously.
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There are no explosions, no blood or fire. There's even air conditioning here. But this could be the future of war, or at least one of its futures. I'm in a darkened hall. The far wall is dominated by a gigantic screen showing the outline of the United States of America, bright, with clusters of light in red and yellow and white. And one by one, the lights are going out all over America. There are no reports of actual deaths yet, but we in the room expect the worst. The map tells of chaos unfolding. Half of America's cities have lost all electricity. Most of the mobile phone networks are down. Planes are grounded. Factories have stopped working. The roads are gridlocked. The reports from nuclear power stations are worrying. And yet no trigger has been pulled, no button pressed, just steady strokes of a keyboard. We're watching a simulated cyber attack unfold, a scenario where several coordinated, sophisticated programs have infiltrated the system and brought it grinding to a halt. This is what some of Washington's best minds are most worried about. This conference in one of the capital's hotels actually then went into wonky, legalistic detail about the powers of the government in relation to private corporations. In such a cyber emergency, since the end of the Soviet Union, the Pentagon has made a wrenching adjustment from facing a near equal army armed with nuclear weapons to fighting dusty wars down dirt tracks against men who plant bombs and then disappear into the shadows. Now it's facing a new front. It is even in the process of setting up its very own Internet. It actually wants military hackers to do their worst, so it can see what defences will work against them. The Chinese are doing something similar. The Red army has established the Blue army, whose job is to probe their own computer systems to find their weaknesses. The Pentagon promises soon to reveal more details about its plans to treat cyber attacks as just another facet of war. And it may well be more than just a cyber response. Not just a string of zeros and ones, but something, as they say, Here, rather more kinetic. As one senior military man put it laconically. You bring down our power grid and we may put a missile down your smokestack. This is not a random threat tossed around out of pique. It is aimed at China and what the Pentagon believes is a cultural misunderstanding. Washington thinks that while it may not be under attack from Beijing, many of its systems and private companies as well as government have been targeted by cyber probes. A US government sponsored report concludes that the level of technology sophistication and the sheer number of people who must be involved is far beyond the means of even the most sophisticated criminal cartel. And it concludes that the only people who'd buy this sort of information is a foreign government. So one way or another, another state is behind it. There's some fascinating detail. Without naming the company they explore. One operation against a defence contractor. An innocent email about a real conference is sent to someone. They open it and that allows operators to access that computer. Then they can get into other machines and access the codes and passes they hold. This goes on undetected for a period of weeks. Then, choosing a time when few are working, a virtual break in is affected by a completely different team. Carefully targeted information is then moved around seven different servers until all trace of it is lost. This is not done by teenage computer nerds surrounded by empty pizza boxes taking a break from playing a level 82 dwarf mage on a computer game. Sadly, it's not done by Matrix style. Young men and women with handsome cheekbones in over long leather coats who are as efficient at lightning fast Kung fu as they are at expressing streams of cybercode. But the philosophy that may be behind it does have a martial arts flavour. Knock out your opponent's systems first, it'll leave you with an enemy who's blind and deaf. The United States military knows that its Chinese counterpart, the People's Liberation army, is very interested in a new doctrine of war. It does away with the need for wave after wave of dispensable troops. Instead, there's a determination to start by blinding the enemy. The Chinese have been studying the US performance in Iraq and Afghanistan and believe logistics is America's weak spot. Getting the right stuff, the vital equipment, to the right places. They believe that even before a bullet is fired, computer attacks can starve the enemy of information, can in fact cut the head from the body. This is of course about so much more than merely stealing information. And the Pentagon wants to make sure that the Red army is aware of the red lines it must not cross before the lights go out.
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Mark Bardell, in Washington. Glasses were doubtless raised in Zagreb last night at the news that Croatia was to become the 28th full member of the European Union. The long negotiations which preceded the announcement were marked by EU concerns over crime and corruption and what was seen in some quarters as Croatia's reluctance to come to terms with its role in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. But Misha Glenny, who back then was our Central Europe correspondent, believes that for Croatia to become part of the wider European family is quite an achievement.
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Exactly 20 years ago today, I was in Zagreb. Within the elegant old Town with its powerful architectural echoes of the Austro Hungarian empire. I recalled the rather doleful features of Jar Ko Domnan announcing to Croatia's recently elected parliament, over which he presided, the secession of his country from the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. It was a sombre affair. There had already been enough wild celebrations the previous year when President Franjo Tudman's Croatian Democratic Union, the hdz, had won the elections, and then later when a referendum in the Yugoslav Republic affirmed popular support for independence. That jubilation, however, was not shared by the Serbs of Croatia, who made up about 12% of the population. The polarization of Croats and Serbs inside both Yugoslavia and Croatia was accelerating, becoming ever more extreme and accompanied by the first atrocities. These had begun in earnest three months earlier, in March 1991, when a group of Croat policemen were killed before having their bodies mutilated by Serb paramilitaries in the village of Borovo Selo. This ominous event was just the beginning in a murderous bloodbath that culminated four years later in the horror of Srebrenica, when forces under the command of General Ratko Mladic slaughtered some 7,000 Bosniak men. The general was only finally arrested one month ago. But the Croat and Bosnian wars, which only finished in 1995, were not the end of the story. Four years later, Kosovo was the theater of a war which saw NATO engage in military combat for the first time in its 50 year history. Even after Kosovo, there was the mini civil war in Macedonia which most people can't remember because mercifully, it never really got out of the starting blocks. The consequences of all this were dire. Somewhere in the region of 100,000 people killed a vast army of refugees. The emergence of mighty criminal networks whose influence stretched well beyond the borders of the former Yugoslavia. Lasting damage to industrial infrastructure and in some areas, the ever present danger of undiscovered anti tank and anti personnel mines. With that level of destruction and trauma, it was hard to imagine how the region might recover. After all, over the 30 years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, some 3,000 people were killed, and during that period, the province received huge sums of money from London and from Brussels. And yet, 14 years after the Good Friday Agreement, we still haven't quite banished the spectre of violence, as we have been reminded again this week. I hope this puts the achievement of Croatia into some perspective, because yesterday, 20 years after the descent into hell, the European Union announced that, pending ratification by all existing 27 member states, Croatia would become its 28th member in July 2013. This is because during the past decade, especially during the last four years, and even more especially over the last 12 months, Croatia has been making a huge effort to reform itself, trying to root out corruption and organized crime wherever it is found. This policy of enlightened self interest was in large part driven by the need to satisfy the strict conditions laid down by the European Union if the country were to be considered a prospective member. Just as Serbia finally handed over Mladic, Croatia too has complied with its obligations to the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, even though it was politically very tough for Zagreb to hand over men considered heroes by large parts of the population. But still more remarkable is one of the central elements in Croatia's strategy for combating the biggest obstacle preventing it from being accepted into the eu organized crime. Because quietly and effectively, Croatia's politicians and police have developed an excellent operational relationship with their counterparts in Serbia. Bitter Enemies just 15 years ago, the two countries, especially under the guidance of their respective presidents, Ivo Josipovich and Boris Tadi, have been mounting investigations against major cigarette smugglers, human traffickers, and, above all, the region's mighty network of cocaine salesmen. As during the wars, the Balkans emerged as a major new route in bringing the drug to Western Europe from South America, the policy of cooperation has been spreading across the Balkans. Furthermore, it is developing its own momentum, no longer the result of prodding by EU bureaucrats. The raft of countries that emerged out of Yugoslavia has been signing agreements on everything from copyright law to sharing of information between their respective intelligence agencies. There is still a long way, but the entry of Croatia into the European Union will mark a profound break with the history of southeastern Europe. We are on the way to defusing what was once known as the powder keg of Europe.
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Misha Glenny. Somali pirates are attacking more ships than ever before, and they're becoming more and more violent. Those were the messages put before the UN Security Council this week as it heard calls for even tougher international action to be taken against them. A recent report into piracy off the coast of Somalia says it's costing the world some £5 billion a year. Dozens of ships and hundreds of hostages are being held by the pirates, who are now seizing ships several hundred miles from the shore. But growing numbers of pirates are now being caught. About 50 are being held in a newly refurbished prison in Hargisi, the capital of the self declared Republic of Somaliland. Mary Harper recently went to the jail in search of an interview.
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You cannot go and see the pirates, said the commander of the prison. They're far too dangerous. And anyway they're fed up with journalists who they say treat this prison as if it was a pirate museum. No, no and no again. Maybe you could bring a pirate out of his cell to speak to me, I suggested. After a long pause and a resigned shrug, the commander agreed. He led me through sandy courtyards where men strolled about in bright blue prison uniforms. We stopped to chat to them. One was in for fighting with his parents, another for grievous bodily harm. We then walked past the cells. There were 10 men in each, their faces glistening with sweat in the darkness, through various heavy doors and long corridors to a room almost completely filled by a big glossy table. The commander told me to sit down and wait. People wandered in and out, some sitting down on the chairs around the table. After sitting silently for quite some time, I asked when the pirate was coming. He's here already, someone said, gesturing casually towards a man in a white skull cap sitting at the other side of the table. I was surprised, as I had expected someone to be brought in in handcuffs and chains. This man was one of those who just wandered in and sat down. I said I needed to be nearer to him so that I could record his voice. He came over and sat right next to me. Although he had a mild face and twinkling eyes, if he'd wanted to, he could have hit me. With very little difficulty. He told me his name was Farah Ismail Eli, that he was 48 years old and that he came from the port town of Basasso. He sprawled back in his chair and seemed very relaxed. He was also rather well dressed. He wore bright red flip flops on his feet and a sarong around his waist. His long sleeve shirt was unwrinkled and he had a small white towel rolled up and wrapped rakishly around his neck. His beard was quite neat. His two front teeth were white, the rest were black. I switched on my recording machine and started the interview. Farah Ismaili made no apologies for what he'd done and explained how unlucky he'd been to be caught on his first ever pirate trip. He said he decided to change jobs from fishing to piracy because foreign trawlers had plundered all the fish in Somali waters. He told me how, with the greatest of ease, he'd bought a speedboat, an AK47 rifle, and a bazooka from a local market. He'd been sentenced to 15 years in jail, reduced to six on appeal. He'd already spent three years inside and had no idea where his wife or children were. There'd been no contact. When I'd finished the interview, he sat back in his chair and gave me a long look. Now, he said, it's time for me to interview you. This really threw me. I knew the correct response would be to decline politely, saying that it was my job as the journalist to do the interviewing. But something inside me told me to give him a chance. Like a true pro, he fired off his questions, the easy ones. First, what's your name? Where do you come from? Then he went in for the attack. What do you really expect you're going to get from interviewing me? What do you want out of it? What's the point? Good question. I told him I'd done a lot of reporting on Somali piracy, and I wanted to understand why the pirates do what they do. Farah Ismaili then launched into a passionate speech, saying he appealed to all Somali pirates to increase their work, to hijack more ships until the international community confiscated all the illegal trawlers. I've spoken to a fair number of Somali pirates over the past few years, and they almost always justify their actions by blaming rapacious foreign trawlers. However, evidence suggests that an increasing number of common criminals are becoming pirates because of the potentially huge rewards. Ransoms of several million have been paid out for the release of ships and their crew, and it's not only former fishermen who are reaping the benefits. A whole pirate economy has developed, with thousands of people involved, including negotiators, insurers, security consultants, and even cooks for the hostages, all taking their share. But it's only some of those, like Farah Ismaili, the people who take to the sea in their tiny speedboats who end up behind bars.
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Mary Harper in Hargeysa Visiting the First World War graves in northern France and Belgium has become something of a rite of passage in spring and summer. The roads of the Somme in particular are full of buses bringing, among others, school children from Britain to stare at the endless rows of white gravestones. But not all British war Graves are as well known, as Andrew Martlou's been finding out on a trip to northern Italy.
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If the soldiers who lie in the British military cemetery at Granettza had died a few months earlier, their graves would have had a constant stream of visitors. And their memorials at Tyne Cot or the Menin Gate would have been part of our national folklore. But in the mountains of northern Italy, I was the first British person to sign the visitors book this year. And hardly anyone remembers that the British fought alongside the Italians in the First World War. In the autumn of 1917, the British army was fighting the Third Battle of Ypres, the one they called Passchendaele. The Italians were fighting the Austrians and the germans at the 12th Battle of the Isonzo, the one they called Caporetto, and they were losing terribly. Ernest Hemingway tells a story in A Farewell to Arms, and an English nurse is at the heart of that book. But the British soldiers who came to strengthen the new front line seem to have disappeared from sight. They came straight out of the trenches of Flanders, from the cold and rain, the mud and the poison gas. As they travelled down through France, the days got warmer in Italy. They had oranges and figs thrown to them as they marched to reinforce the Italian line. Some were lucky. They moved into trenches that were on warm, dry hills. Others weren't so fortunate. The swamps north of Venice meant a return to the familiar mud, with the added joys of mosquitoes and malaria. But in the early spring, they left the Venetian plain and marched towards the foothills of the Alps, which rise without preamble straight from sea level to 3,000ft and more. They managed the ascent by marching for 20 minutes, then stopping for 10 through an achingly long day. And they found a very different world. In many places, the pine woods were still standing, as they are now, cool and shady today, but then still covered with snow and liable to burst into flames during Austrian artillery bombardments. And the trenches are still there too, if you know where to look and are prepared to scramble up steep hillsides. You can still trace the trench systems, but they're nothing like the military engineering of Flanders. No complex dugouts with wooden walls and beds for officers. Here, the trenches were hewn and blasted out of solid rock. They zigzagged without military sense as they followed fissures in the limestone. And when incoming artillery fire struck the rock shrapnel from shells was augmented by razor sharp splinters of rock. And there they stayed, up in the hills of the Asiago Plateau through the summer of 1918 until the first of November. Early that morning, with so little notice that the British troops didn't get their pre battle cup of tea. They attacked and found the Austrian army crumbling before them. They became the first British troops to cross the pre war boundaries into enemy territory. They advanced so fast that it was two days before their rations caught up with them. Through woods, up and down precipitous slopes that dropped hundreds of feet at a time, until on November 4, 1918, their armistice was signed. But there had been a cost. Not the slaughter of the Somme perhaps, but the sons of 712 families lie in the five small cemeteries in the woods along unpaved roads in the hills around Asiago. Like all Commonwealth war cemeteries, they are immaculate, surrounded by walls of rough hewn grey granite blocks. The grass is neat, the tidy plants along the rows of white headstones waiting to flower in the clear mountain sunlight. And the only sound beyond the wind whispering through the trees is birdsong, pure and sweet. But the memorial that affected me most as I traced the British progress was not a British cemetery, nor yet the white arch of marble that towers over the town of Asiago, where both Italian and Austrian bones are interred together. What touched me most was a modern war memorial in a medieval village a few miles from Trentino, at a place where British soldiers stopped at the end of the war. Carved in black on a gleaming slab of polished cream stone and separated by the upright of a thin Black Cross are 17 Italian names from the First World War when we were allies, and seven from the second, when for some of the time we were enemies. Perhaps that is why, as the Fascists took control of Italy, the British role in the Italian war was quietly put out of sight, although the British cemeteries survived as silent, perhaps inconvenient, but still protected witnesses of a former alliance as they do to this day.
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Andrew Martlew in the hills of northern Italy, bringing this program to a close. There'll be two editions next week on Thursday and on Saturday. I hope you'll join us then. Goodbye.