← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
June 4, 2011
00:28:13
A mysterious encounter with the sinister Colonel Tariq, thought to be from Pakistani...
Loading summary
Transcript14 lines
- [00:00]
Aamir Ahmad Khan
Hi there.
- [00:00]
Tim Whewell
You're about to hear from our own
- [00:02]
Kate Adie
correspondent, a Download from the BBC. We make editions of the program for both the BBC World Service and Radio 4. And this is the latest Radio 4 broadcast. As ever, it's introduced by Kate Ady.
- [00:14]
Andrew Hoskin
Today there's a sinister phone call from Pakistani intelligence. We find the price of a Kalashnikov shooting up in the mountains and desert of Sinai, a game of two halves in Benghazi as football fans get their own back on the Gaddafis. And we learn they may be poor out there on the foothills of Romania's Carpathian Mountains, but they certainly know how to have a good time. We will not shut our voices down. Those were the words of one Pakistani journalist at the funeral this week of a colleague, Saleem Shahzad, whose mutilated body was found near Islamabad on Tuesday. Pakistan's main intelligence agency, the isi, has denied accusations that it was responsible for the killing which has been condemned around the world. Aamir Ahmed Khan, who now works for the BBC World Service, says journalists in Pakistan are well aware that their activities are closely monitored by the authorities.
- [01:10]
Aamir Ahmad Khan
I got a call one day from a gentleman who introduced himself as Colonel Tariq, now in Pakistan. Getting a call from anyone who calls himself Colonel Tariq is usually bad news. Somehow you instinctively know that the name is not real and the call means trouble. Now that was way back in 2001, just a few days after a magazine I was editing ran a cover story entitled the ISI Taliban Nexus. Clearly someone in the interservices intelligence wasn't happy. I often read your magazine, Amir Sahib, the caller said, sounding completely relaxed and cordial. I murmured a thank you, wondering when he would get to the point. He didn't take long. In fact, I know quite a bit about you. You drive a Honda City, don't you? He said. In fact, your wife has the car most of the time. No. Bluntly, I asked him what he was up to. It is such a lovely family, he went on. You know when she is driving your kids to school every morning, they talk non stop and I find myself wondering why people like you think they can be journalists and have a family at the same time. The line went dead. A panicked call home established that all was well and a few more calls to the relevant people from my powerful publisher ensured that Kannatarik never called again. But there was a catch. I had to go to the ISI headquarters in Islamabad and meet the internal security people there. Although I was treated politely, I could not shake off a creepy feeling that someone in that heavily fortified building had ordered that my family be watched. I was greeted by a brigadier this time who introduced himself as Javed again, one of those names that you can never be sure of. He brought a huge pile of my magazines with him. All were labeled with different colored post it notes. It transpired the articles had been color coded according to the extent of the danger they were deemed to pose to the national interest. How, he wondered if, as he leaped through the first one and then another, could any Pakistani be so unpatriotic? Something in his accent made me ask him what part of Pakistan he was from. It turned out that he was from the same village as my grandmother. In an instant, all the danger I had ostensibly posed to national security evaporated. He even embraced me on the way out. I asked him why they'd had my family tailed. You know, some of our people are so motivated that they sometimes overstep their brief. He smiled proudly. But don't worry. It won't happen again. I was uneasy for months afterwards, but when I look back now, I can't help thinking I was exceptionally lucky. Our Tribal Areas correspondent was once picked up by the ISI and released after being severely tortured. Within a few hours of his disappearance, we had made contact with every government official we knew, from the local police officer to the interior minister. It was only when they stopped answering our calls that we realized that it must have been the work of Bhai Log, or Brothers, as ISI officials are commonly known. I then received a call from a journalist I knew was in close contact with the isi. He told me that a dead body answering my correspondence description had been taken to a hospital in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. The 40 minutes it took me to reach the hospital were the most difficult minutes of my life as a journalist. When I saw the body, I could have hugged it. I was so relieved it wasn't my colleague. And when he was finally released the next evening, I found myself saying a silent thank you to his tormentors for letting him live. Others, of course, never go home. I remember going to North Wadiristan in July 2006 after a 30 year old journalist called Hayatullah was abducted allegedly by the security or intelligence forces. He was held for six months before being shot in the head and dumped by the roadside. What struck me about that incident was that everyone in the area, everyone seemed to know exactly who his tormentors were. Some even mentioned a name, apparently an ISI major who reportedly would call Hayatullah's family and tell them that he had not yet made up his mind whether to release or to kill him. So it's no surprise that Salim Shahzad's death immediately led to allegations against the isi. Every reporter in Pakistan knows how closely the agency monitors the media and that Salim Shahzad is not the first to meet such a brutal fate. More worryingly, the journalists also know that unless his killers are brought to justice, he won't be the last one either.
- [05:44]
Andrew Hoskin
That's Aamir Ahmad Khan now in London. On March 19 this year, Colonel Gaddafi's tanks entered Benghazi with orders apparently to level this by now rebel controlled city in eastern Libya. Only intervention by French, British and US warplanes, together with fierce resistance from the locals, prevented a likely massacre. The antipathy, you could call it hatred, between Colonel Gaddafi and this independent minded port city runs deep. Andrew Hoskin has been looking at some of the reasons why.
- [06:15]
Kate Adie
The other day I was taken to see a pile of rubble in Benghazi. As you can imagine, there are quite a few piles of rubble in Benghazi at the moment, with little to distinguish them. But this pile stood next to fragments of a sports stadium, and lurking morosely on the periphery of some wasteland were half a dozen or so floodlights, their long extinguished lamps dipped more in pity than illumination. This was once the club HQ of the Al Ahli Benghazi Football Club, and the remarkable story of how its hallowed turf was turned into scorched earth reveals much about Libya under Colonel Gaddafi and his family and why the revolution originated in this extraordinary city. In recent months, a number of important places have been reduced to ruins in what is habitually referred to as the rebel stronghold of Benghazi. Both the Ministry of Internal Security and the hated Katiba army barracks have felt the force of revolutionary fervor. At the Katiba. The rebels requisitioned bulldozers from a local plant hire company to conduct some arbitrary demolitions on sight, as well as making a number of other alterations by means of fire. Colonel Gaddafi always stayed in the Katiba during his few visits to Benghazi, whose people he always distrusted. I had a look round and I doubt very much whether he will like what they have done with the place. As for the Al Ahli Football Club, retribution came its way in the shape of Colonel Gaddafi's football obsessed son, Saadi. In 2000, the fans of Al Ahli had tired of the alleged match fixing antics of Saadi, who ran a rival club in Tripoli. They dressed a donkey in Saadi's football strip and generally behaved in the boorish way most of us expect to see on terraces the world over. But Sadi's love of the game did not extend to to tolerating the puerile behavior of a few Al Ahli fans. He had the club razed to the ground and arrested. Scores of fans, three were sentenced to death. It's little wonder that among those rampaging around the Katiba were many Al Ahli fans looking for a sudden death goal against the regime in extra time. It's a remarkable story for many reasons, not least because the efficiency shown by the Gaddafi regime in knocking down the club stands in complete contrast to its apparent inability up any long lasting legacy, particularly in Benghazi. A young engineering student called Abdul Salam agreed to take me on a strange tour of the great building projects that the regime, for all its supposed ruthlessness, has failed to see through to completion. First up, the west Benghazi Newtown project. 2000 oil brings us $120 billion a year, said Abdul Salam. And yet everyone lives with their parents. West Benghazi was supposed to provide the city's youth with an extra 200,000 homes. And yet, as far as I can see, the husks of incomplete apartment blocks are all that constitute the promised utopia. That and the many cranes that stand idly by. Nearby, a placard hails another Gaddafi project, the great Trans Libyan Railway line, linking Tobruk in Egypt in the east with Tripoli and the west and beyond to Tunisia. You learn very quickly around here that Colonel Gaddafi is very fond of placards heralding grand new building projects. What's happening behind the scaffolding is often very different, as is the case for the Great Trans Libyan Railway. I can report there is no great terminus as yet, but the buffers seem very soundly constructed. From here, the twin tracks course their way through the desert from the for approximately 800 metres before petering out beside a resting goatherd and his flock. Ha ha. Exulted my young engineer guide. What did I tell you? Not only had Gaddafi failed to make the railways run on time, he had failed to make the railways. Then off to Benghazi's newly finished hospital, started 40 years ago and just completed, said Abdul Salam. They started and finished Dubai in the same time. Then a look at the far from finished and apparently abandoned March 28 football stadium where Libya hopes to host the 2013 African cup of Nations tournament. Other unfinished works included a cafe complex, a golf course and one of the Colonel's celebrated man made rivers laid low by a big corporate bankruptcy. We in Benghazi always know this of Gaddafi, abdussalam told me. The guy just can't finish anything he starts. So here was a dictator whose diktat didn't appear to run as far as building contractors. Nor would it seem to the people of Benghazi. You can folly some of the people some of the time, says a graffiti message with delightful malapropism on a broken wall inside the Katiba, but you can't folly all of the people all of the time.
- [11:21]
Andrew Hoskin
Andrew Hoskin, back now from Benghazi. Egypt's Sinai Peninsula may be best known to foreigners for its Red Sea beach resorts, where hundreds of thousands go each year to snorkel and dive amid coral reefs. It's a relatively safe, tranquil area, but the northern, more populated half of Sinai is very different. This morning three Egyptian soldiers are reported to have been killed near the town of El Arish. A man drove a truck through a checkpoint and into a tent where they were sleeping. This part of Sinai is an area where the movement of foreigners, particularly journalists, is restricted. Tim Whewell, who's there nonetheless has been finding out that Egypt's recent revolution has done nothing to ease tensions between the authorities there and the once nomadic Bedouin population.
- [12:08]
Tim Whewell
Doves strutted across the courtyard. Bougainvillea tumbled from the balcony in a purple cascade. From the main reception room upstairs came a series of sharp metallic clicks. A Bedouin arms dealer, his face swathed for anonymity in a red and white checked headdress, was showing me how to assemble an AK47 rifle. From 2000 to 2007, he said, there were five of us in charge of the arms trade in Sinai. Not a month passed without us each doing four or five deals, each worth between 200 and 400 pieces. If each Kalashnikov, as he said, cost about 300 pounds, you can work out for yourself how much he earned. My arithmetic's bad, but I could appreciate the costly delicacy of the alternate salmon and cream stone cladding of his mansion, the mock classical balustrades, the whimsical observation tower above the third story roof. Dotted across the scrub. Similar monuments to new wealth had sprung up, oversized excrescences in the untidy landscape of goats, brushwood shelters and discarded chunks of concrete. Many sported strange pagoda like toppings. Why Chinese architectural tastes have caught on in this far corner of Egypt, my guide couldn't explain. Nor could I be sure what money those other mansions were built on. But within sight was the border of the Gaza Strip, riddled with smuggling tunnels. And smuggling round here is the best source of income. Lords of the sand they used to call the Bedouin. But today they bear only partial resemblance to the white robed swashbucklers befriended by Lawrence of Arabia and reimagined for the cinema By David Lean. I met one young Bedouin who wore a white robe as a badge of identity. But the arms dealer seems more comfortable in T shirt and shiny tracksuit bottoms. I sat in one ceremonial guest tent, cream canvas like a British wedding marquee rather than black camel hair. But for the most part, temporary homes are felt have been swapped for permanent ones of breeze block. Two crucial things, though, haven't changed for the Bedouin. First, their belief that they're the rightful masters of Sinai's mountains and desert. Second, their attachment to weapons. And now, the more they're asserting their rights against the Egyptian state, the more those weapons seem to be needed. States and Bedouin don't mix well because borders mean little to them. Several of the tribes of Sinai live on both sides of the arbitrary straight line in the sand drawn to separate Egypt from what is now Israel. No wonder some of them saw advantages in the temporary removal of that line after 1967, when Israel occupied Sinai. No wonder now that it's back in place. Some are skilled at passing drugs or escorting would be immigrants across the frontier. But no wonder either then, that official Egypt views them with suspicion. Since it regained Sinai 30 years ago, it's brought settlers from the Nile Valley to change the peninsula's demography. Bedouins say they're excluded from jobs in the army, police and civil service, and can't even get work in the booming beach resorts of Sinai's southern Red Sea coast. Revolution broke out in Sinai last January, as in the rest of Egypt. But here, even more than elsewhere, it's unfinished business. The state hasn't become more open. For the first few days after I arrived in Sinai's main town, El Arish, the authorities prevented me even leaving the hotel, saying I had no permission to work in the peninsula. Meanwhile, Bedouin who attacked government buildings four months ago still haven't let the police back on the streets in the most sensitive areas near the Gazan border. They'll be banned, the Kalashnik of Diyora tells me, until the authorities drop charges against thousands of Bedouin who they say have been wrongly accused of smuggling and other crimes. And in the meantime, of course, that's very good business for him. With no police around, he says, people have to protect themselves. The price of Kalashnikovs is shooting up and the main market now is Sinai itself, not Gaza. One night, a young engineer shows me a snapshot on his mobile phone of him cradling his new AK47. Everyone's buying one, he says. The fear is that state authority is now so weakened in north Sinai, there's nothing to stop perennial tribal disputes escalating into major conflict. There's a police car outside the hotel ensuring I don't leave for my own safety, they say. But on the edge of town, there's no one in uniform to restrain a crowd who blocks the main road, vowing revenge on a rival tribe they say have kidnapped nine of their members. The law, as we were taught in Sunday school, came out of Sinai. It's where Moses received the Ten Commandments. But there's not much law or order there anymore.
- [17:14]
Andrew Hoskin
Tim Yuhl in Sinai, next to Beijing, a city growing at an astonishing pace. In the last decade, more than 6 million people have moved to the Chinese capital. The authorities there have responded by embarking on a huge house building program. But for the moment, there's just not enough accommodation to go round. And Martin Patience has been discovering that means some have been forced underground and are living in air raid shelters, basements and tunnels.
- [17:44]
Martin Patience
Even by Beijing standards, a sprawling city of almost 20 million, it wasn't the easiest of addresses to find. We arrived at a 20 story apartment building on the outskirts of town. It's a place where the subway lines stop and where huge cauldron like power stations rear into view. But instead of taking the lift up into the apartments, we entered an easy to miss doorway and descended a dark flight of stairs. The echoes of our footsteps flooded our ears. And then in front of us was a thick steel door with two bolts across it. It was the only clue that this was an air raid shelter. But more surprising than that, it was also a place that dozens of people call home. Walking along the dark and dingy corridors, you could hear the muffled sounds of life. We'd arranged to meet two young women living in the shelter. They were staying in room number 27, which was relatively easy to find. One of the women was Jong Li Na. She was a tough 18 year old who was trying to make it in the big city. She'd found work in a restaurant as a waitress, but Li Na had quit her job and now was trying to find something better. An old colleague, Peng Jing, was her roommate. She was from southern China and had a loud, throaty voice which boomed off the walls. Their home, if you can call it that, was a tiny room There was a single bed which they both slept in, and there was enough space for a small chest of drawers. And they shared three toilets with the hundred or so other people living in the shelter. For these damp surroundings, the women paid about £30amonth. And if you wanted to hire a TV, well, that would be £5 extra. And then if you wanted to get reception for that TV, that would be another £1 50 again for a month. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lina told me that the shelter was affecting her health. She said that at least twice a day she'd leave her room and go outside. She'd suck in the air and watch the city. Normal life above ground. No one knows for sure how many people live in the shelters and tunnels, bunkers and basements of Beijing. They're sometimes called the Mousetribe and could number 1 million. Most are migrants sweeping into China's cities in the last decade or so in what is the largest wave of urbanization that human history has ever seen. But priced out of the property market, they're living under the pavements in a city of rapid change. Beijing has seen its population swell by more than 6 million in the last decade. So it's little wonder then that the authorities are running into some difficulties. There was a ruling last year that those living in the city's air raid shelters were were to be moved out. But like many rulings here, there's little follow through. The Chinese authorities are aiming to build 10 million new affordable homes across the country this year. In the next five years, they hope to build a total of 35 million. The numbers, as always in China, are astonishing. And these new apartments are to be aimed at poor and middle class families to either rent or buy. Well, that's the idea anyway. But if you look at the track record, it's not particularly good. In the past, many of these affordable homes have been snapped up, either by government officials or property developers, who have then sold them on at enormous profit. Back underground, Li Na and her friends are preparing for a night out. Li Na is avidly doing her makeup, putting on blusher, holding up the mirror and then laying it down on the folds of the bed sheets every few minutes. She'd then redo it. They weren't planning to do anything fancy after all. They don't have much money. They'd probably eat some street snacks and then take a wander to a local park where the elderly often gather to dance in the evenings. Being underground, of course, you have no idea what the weather's like upstairs. I didn't have the heart to tell them it was raining, extremely rare for Beijing, and so there wouldn't be any dancing. But even then I doubt it would have dampened their enthusiasm. Despite starting at the very bottom, Li Na was determined to make the best of her life. The gloom of her surroundings hadn't stopped her dreaming. When I look up at the high buildings, I see the neon lights, she told me. I see the hundreds of windows and homes. And of course, I dreamed that one day I'll buy my own apartment.
- [22:57]
Andrew Hoskin
And that's Martin Patience. Romania may have seen enormous changes since bidding farewell to Communist rule at the end of the 1980s. Hard won political and economic reforms led to membership of the European Union in 2007. That in turn brought some modernisation to one of the country's biggest sources of revenue and employment, agriculture. And yet, sometimes in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, life still seems to go on as it's done for hundreds of years. As Caroline Jeweller's been finding out, being
- [23:30]
Caroline Jewellers
squashed between strangers on the back of a lurching lorry and whacked by overhanging branches may not sound like a recipe for happiness, but for me it was a sign that I'd truly arrived. Earlier that morning, I'd joined a cheerful crowd of 50 or 60 farmers in a village square in south west Romania for the annual smalzel or measuring of sheep's milk. We had clambered into a motley assortment of cars, vans, tractors and this elderly truck, and were climbing through forests of tall, freshly sprouting beech trees to a sheepfold around 700 metres higher up. We were close to the Danube at the south western end of the Carpathians. The landscape to the west of the thickly wooded mountains was patterned with small orchards, horse ploughed fields and pastures, examples of the modest but self sufficient holdings that are vital for Romania's economic survival. Flanking the village were clusters of little wooden farmsteads bounded by flowering hedges and connected by grassy lanes. The foothills had been sized so thoroughly that they looked like velvet. Life is tough in rural Romania. EU statistics say that nearly half the people here are living on or below the poverty line. If you think everyone is miserable though, you'd be wrong. I was staying on a farm that supported seven people, three generations of one family. The house had no hot running water, no fridge and the lavatory was an old fashioned composter train in the garden. Everyone worked on the farm and two of them had other jobs as well. There was plenty of food and I've rarely met people with such a zest. For living, Smulzel is part of a farming calendar that could have originated in the Stone Age. The Communists tried to suppress gatherings like this, but the practice continued quietly throughout the 40 years they were in power. Now, in this village, 22 years after the end of that era, this is a festive day out which attracts students of folklore as well as curious visitors like me. Like many Romanian highland villages, this one owns common land in the mountains. Attached to Those pastures are 18 sheepfolds. Most of the 450 households here have at least a couple of sheep and and it makes sense to graze them together and share the produce as well as the work. As a rule, Romanians don't eat lamb, so they keep sheep for making curd cheese. The sheep graze the mountains from April to October, and during the summer, villagers take turns to milk the ewes and produce delicious varieties of kash, brinza, de burduf and urda. They share it out among the owners. The amount they get depends on how much milk each one notched up. At Smalzole, in the house where I was staying, the grandfather was the batyu, or chief shepherd, of one of the communal flocks. Shepherd here means sheep owner. They hire outsiders to protect the ewes. I asked him where the villagers sold their cheese. He smiled at my consumerist attitude. We don't sell it. We make it for ourselves. That truck taking me to the Smolzel was so crammed that at first I panicked. My companions, from children to grannies, were crouching or perching precariously on a plank propped up by two logs. Nobody else seemed perturbed when they saw how scared I was. One or two of them pulled me to the benches, running round the edge where I could breathe. Everyone ducked when the lorry brushed through branches, and a teenager took the chance to pull down a handful of beech buds. Eating some herself, she held out the rest to me. Go on, take them. They're good. She was right. The leaves were nutty and sweet. Despite the discomfort, everyone was chatting, sharing jokes, and teasing each other. It made me feel like a real Romanian. After two hours, we arrived at a mountain top clearing. The sun was boiling, and in a pen beside the fold were 300 shaggy, panting sheep. The owner sat on one side of a special wooden screen with big portholes to let the sheep in one by one. Although sweating profusely, the men were deft, and soon there were 12 frothy buckets of milk waiting to be measured, watched by eagle eyes, the official measurer carefully smoothed the froth away and dipped a notch stick into the milk. The batu noted down the amounts and announced the final results in a melodious baritone that commanded respect. The mayor and the Orthodox priest made rousing speeches. Then we picnicked on roast meat, bright yellow polenta which Romanians call mamaliga, bottles of pop, and home distilled plum brandy. We'd forgotten about the sheep. I only noticed them leaving the fold because of their bells. The hired shepherd raised a hand as he passed. A bottle hung carelessly from his fingers. Then he, the flock, and his dogs vanished slowly into the woods, leaving us to make our even jerkier way home.
- [28:01]
Andrew Hoskin
And on that appropriately bucolic note, for a sunny Saturday morning, it's time for us to go. We'll have more dispatches from around the world on Thursday and Saturday of next week, so please join us then. Goodbye.