← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Kerouac's Back
00:27:56
Story telling: Kerouac the runaway dog returns from his adventures in Mali and the our...
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Hello from the.
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From our own correspondence studios at Broadcasting House in London, you've downloaded the latest
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edition of the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
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It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Hello. Today, what hope now for the world's newest nation? Foreign soldiers have joined the fighting in South Sudan. Peace talks are faltering and the joy which accompanied independence two years ago is almost gone. In Afghanistan, the number of attacks on women is soaring as the withdrawal of Western troops gathers pace. The return of a runaway dog in Mali means an awkward meeting with the chief of Police and there's a sweaty chat about gay sex with two Russian hunters in the Ural Mountains. So the Ugandan army has now joined the fighting in South Sudan. The Ugandan president said his soldiers were fighting alongside government troops against rebel forces. He said the rebels had been defeated in what he described as a big battle around the town of border. Talks about a possible peace deal have been going on in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, but there's little optimism about the eventual outcome. Andrew Harding's Our man, providing coverage in and around the South Sudanese capital, Juba.
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We tried a tow rope. It snapped. Someone started banging the car battery with a rock. For some reason, that didn't work either. It was midday and hot. We'd been driving along what pass for roads in South Sudan for perhaps three hours. Around us, a daunting landscape. Vast flat plains broken by a few steep hills that jutted out like toys in a sand pit. Eventually, we started pushing the car. Still no luck. Finally, someone fixed the tow rope and our two vehicles resumed their queasy lurch away from the front lines and back towards the capital, Juba. Beside me at the wheel, Jacob Deng was stroking his wispy goatee and wondering what had happened to the brand new country he fought so long to get. No one expected this, he said. Like so many in South Sudan, Jacob's life has already been warped by decades of conflict. I've reported on more than a dozen wars in Africa, but there is something unique about this place, something epic in its scale and suffering. Jacob fled to Ethiopia when he was eight to escape the civil war. He came home, then fled again, this time alone, walking through the bush to a refugee camp in Kenya. When he was old enough, he joined South Sudan's rebel army, the spla, in its long struggle against the Islamic government in the north and sometimes against itself. It was a gruelling fight. I remember swerving to avoid the dead soldiers littering the road towards Juba in 2002. Northern bombers overhead, more bodies rotting in the trenches near a town called Turid. Jacob was there, too, carrying away the SPLA wounded. Then came the 2005 peace deal to end Africa's longest war. And in 2011, I watched the crowds in Juba lining up to vote for independence, giddy with surprise and joy, Jacob among them. It seemed like a miracle, he said. Not that anyone thought independence would be easy. This continent's history is littered with examples of how freedom can be squandered, more specifically, of how liberation movements can implode when they step off the battlefield. And so there were plenty of people on hand here to try to make sure oil rich South Sudan survived. An American marine, a Rwandan soldier and a Spanish aid worker walk into a Chinese supermarket. There's no punchline. It's just something I saw here last week. The point is, many countries and vast amounts of money have been involved some would say wasted in trying to create something resembling a functioning state. So was there a moment when it became clear the South Sudan project was failing? Maybe it was the day we learned that patriotic government officials had stolen more than two and a half billion dollars. Maybe it was when a faction of the governing SPLM called a news conference to declare the president was becoming a dictator. There were other clues. Instead of a national army, South Sudan had a superficial coalition of warlords and ethnic militias. Generals would defect in anticipation of the bribes they'd receive to return to the fold. The actual trigger for the conflict that erupted last month remains in dispute. Nobody sensible thinks it was an attempted coup. But as one senior official in the SPLN put it to me, the kerosene was there. So was the firewood. Who cares who lit the match? And arrogant men are to blame. Two in particular, it seems. The increasingly authoritarian president and his furiously ambitious former deputy. Old rivals from the two biggest ethnic groups here. The price for that rivalry has been steep. In the past week I've met a 12 year old whose younger brother was shot dead. Beside him, a teacher chased from his home by neighbors he thought were his friends. Close on Half a million people have fled their homes, and now, as I type this, Jacob is getting quietly drunk at the hotel bar. People here are big drinkers anyway. I remember some grinning SPLA soldiers pushing a case of Pale Ale through my car window years ago after visiting them on the front lines. But now the drinking here seems faster to beat the evening curfew and cheerless Jacob, an ethnic dinker, has been on the phone to one of his closest friends, a newair called John. This used to be a chaotic but cosmopolitan city. But today John is trapped with thousands of other new air at a makeshift camp near the airport, protected by the un. If he left now, he would probably be killed. I suppose we've been through worse, said Jacob, slurring his words.
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Andrew Harding in South Sudan there's growing speculation in Afghanistan about what will happen when the NATO forces complete their withdrawal from the country. Most are due out before the end of the year. Foreigners living there are one group who consider themselves at risk. Yesterday there was a suicide bomb attack on a restaurant in Kabul popular with the expat community. More than 20 people were killed. The pullout of Western troops is also said to be one of the factors behind a recent sharp increase in the number of attacks on women there. And Caroline Wyatt says there are fears that the lot of women, especially those in the countryside, could deteriorate when the NATO forces go.
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It was a story that was both shocking and depressingly familiar. An 11 year old afghan girl forced by her brother to wear a suicide vest and told her to blow up a police checkpoint for the Taliban. It happened in Helmand, a place that even here makes people shake their heads and give a sad shrug that suggests, well, what do you expect? There was outrage a little on dismay rather more over Sposhmi's story. But in a country where recent news included a seven year old sold for a few thousand dollars in marriage to a 35 year old so her father could buy drugs, Sposzmai's woes didn't trouble the public consciousness here for long. In fact, they barely made the news after a day or two. The girls and women we interview here are often those whose lives are extreme and who symbolise all that is worst or wrong with the place. I wondered about that when I met two young Afghan women with very different lives, Adila and Al Zu, both university students. Azu in her fourth year of studying physics, literature and language. Student Adila wouldn't look out of place sitting in a Paris cafe, elegantly though modestly dressed, her eyeliner making her expressive brown eyes even bigger and her headscarf revealing just a hint of glossy, long black hair. Azu the more earnest of the two, but both keen to stress just how different their lives are to their mothers and their grandmothers. Both remember the Taliban era when they had to study in secret. Their mothers had no education. Now Adila and Azu are determined to help poorer women here to get an education. They believe that remains the key to changing Afghanistan and people's attitudes towards women. What would they do after university I asked them. More studies, both said. And if they got married, would they still plan to go out to work? There was an awkward silence that they eventually said depended on their families and what their husbands thought. It sounded rather as if the answer was no. Despite outward appearances. A few days later we drove the long road east out of Kabul, the choking traffic thinning as we headed out of the city. But the city limits I remembered from previous trips were no longer there now. New building after building lined the road. Massive blocks of modern glass and concrete flats had sprouted from the sandy soil until they almost blocked out the mountains on the horizon. It wasn't until we reached the military outpost we were seeking that the city receded and turned back into the plains that I'd remembered. I wondered if those new blocks were seeded by poppy money or fertilised by Western cash, and then chided myself for cynicism. There is much new business being done here. Despite the high level of dependence on outside support. The latter was evident when we arrived at Sandhurst in the sand, the nickname for the new military academy that British officers are helping develop as the UK's lasting legacy in Afghanistan. We were there to meet Second Lieutenant Siddiqua, a quiet, self possessed 28 year old who watched us warily as we arrived. She's the first Afghan female trainer to arrive here, ahead of the women officer cadets who'll start in June. Siddiqua told me she joined the Afghan army because she wanted to serve her country, as many of her family already did. I asked if she was worried by the deaths and injuries her army was suffering in Helmand and elsewhere. More than a thousand killed in 2012 and several thousand injured in Helmand again. Three Afghan policewomen have been targeted and killed over the past few years. Sadiqa nodded thoughtfully but said it hadn't put her off and that her husband was also happy for her to serve. As for female equality in Afghanistan, her raised eyebrows said it all. Siddiqua wasn't sure we could even begin to talk of equality for women in Afghanistan. Even men didn't have many rights, she said, and females far fewer. The TV and radio news were full of stories about violence against women. Most days, she said, once you could begin to talk of human rights. Then perhaps one day, she told me, women's rights could start here, too. We left Siddiqua in a classroom, learning how to teach the women who will soon start here at the academy. If all goes well, it will welcome a hundred or so female cadets every year. Siddiqua and the others are brave women, says Claire, one of the British mentors, as we prepare to leave. Brave to join this army and brave to serve here in Afghanistan. I couldn't help but agree.
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Caroline Wyatt it was back to the polling booths for Egyptians this week, their third constitutional referendum in as many years. It was generally regarded as a vote on the army's overthrow last July of the Islamist president Mohammed Morsi. The official results due in a few hours time. But don't hold your breath. No one in Egypt seems in any doubt will hear that the new constitution has been approved by a huge major the military backed authorities insist that the passage of the constitution was a democratic milestone, but Olagarin in Cairo says there are many who fear the country's returning to the authoritarianism of the past.
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The mission was high risk. We arranged a rendezvous by phone. It had to be indoors. We couldn't be seen on the streets. After all, we wanted to do something the authorities might not like. We were planning to film a poster. Stacks of this particular poster were tucked away in the back office of the Strong Egypt Party, a grouping of moderate Islamists. A bespectacled, clean shaven party official gave us a glimpse. The orange and white posters didn't look very threatening, but about a dozen of his party colleagues were arrested for trying to put them up. Seven were charged with terrorism offenses. What menacing message was on the poster? It urged a no vote in the referendum on the constitution in what officials call the new democratic Egypt. This was apparently taking free will a bit too far. With the silencing of the no campaign, the voters were really given little choice. Ironically, many would probably have approved the constitution anyway. The first in line at the polling station was a 50 year old accountant called Atiyyat, who was voting yes. Today is the last day of the fall of the Brotherhood, she said with a smile. This was the first vote since the Islamist president Mohammed Morsi was ousted by the army last July. Many, like Atiyeh, wanted to endorse his overthrow and the ensuing crackdown on his Muslim Brotherhood. Others told us they hoped the constitution would help bring stability, as the authorities had been promising. And some seem to have adopted the default setting going along with the generals. I don't know what's in the constitution, one man told us, but if the army thinks it's good, then I have to support it. State TV suddenly started referring to the referendum as a democratic ceremony, a phrase not used since the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Much of his playbook is back in use intimidation, summary arrests and excessive force. First, the Islamists were the targets. But secular activists have also been getting a refresher course. Leading female protesters arrested at a demonstration late last year were beaten and stranded in the desert, a trademark tactic of the Mubarak era. Some of their male colleagues, key pro democracy campaigners, have been sentenced to three years in jail with hard labour. Their crime? Daring to demonstrate. Protests are now all but banned. If people power was the hallmark of recent years in Egypt, now its tear gas, mass arrests and a liberal dose of farce. Sports stars have been stripped of medals and suspended from their teams for raising four fingers. That's a gesture of opposition to the removal of Mohamed Morsi. A 15 year old schoolboy was arrested for having a ruler bearing the symbol. The legal charges against the former president now range from colluding with foreign militants to stealing chickens during a jailbreak. Many here believe or fear Egypt has come full circle since the revolution of 2011. Presidential elections are on the way. The army chief, General Abdel Fattah El Sisi, looks assured of a landslide victory if he decides to run. So another general could soon occupy the presidency. Three years after the end of decades of military rule, when revolutionaries filled Tafrir Square in January 2011, few would have predicted this outcome. The celebrated Egyptian author Adaf Zuef was among the throng sitting in her son's book filled apartment just a heartbeat from the square. She now says the situation is profoundly sad, but not hopeless. I think we thought we had a miracle, she told me. Well, we did not. We have something very real that we need to continue to work on. Those early days in Tahrir Square really serve almost as a trailer to show us what we want. As for the old regime, she says, it's taking on yet another face. And this time, she warns, it's coming back ferociously.
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Olagarin in Cairo now. Mali is certainly not the only country in the world where bribery and corruption help oil the cogwheels of daily life. You want to pass your school exams? Well, forget the studying and start saving. You can buy a Baccalaureate for £300. Greased palms will also smooth land deals and indeed, many an encounter with authority. So when our correspondent in Bamako, Alex Duval Smith, received a phone call from the local police saying they'd found a runaway dog, she suspected a demand on her wallet might soon follow.
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The voice on the end of the phone is deep and mysterious. My name's Lieutenant Gaku. I found the dog hiding under a container in my forecourt. I had him taken to the gendarmerie canine unit. I can help you get him back. Kerouac. The runaway mutt isn't even mine. He came into my life and ran out of it two months ago. He and his French owner Stephane had parked their camper in my street for a week. Despite the risk of kidnapping by Al Qaeda, there's still a breed of traveller that defies international travel warnings to churn through this region in old lorries. Stefan and Kerouac were part of such a convoy. Except that on the day his party set off, Kerouac was nowhere to be found. Hostage to a hormonal high, he'd apparently run off with a pack of local hounds. Stefan left Mali in floods of tears. The mean streets of Bamako are no place for a bumptious slobberpot who sleeps with his owner and cries when left the wrong side of a door. In Mali, keeping a pet is almost unheard of. Children throw stones at dogs and both grow up in fear of one another. Having hung up on Lt. Gaku and his apparent bad intentions, I'm suddenly struck with remorse. I have visions of the fluffy black and white setter cowering in confused terror in a filthy dog pound. I can't bear it. I decide I need to find the gendarmerie dog unit. Bamako puts up its usual obstacle course of potholes, tides of motor scooters fleeing chickens, children begging at junctions and donkeys pulling impossible loads. But eventually, in a distant southern suburb, I find the unit and its chief, Lieutenant Bow, who takes me to see Kerouac. The hound is looking his usual floppy and placid self, thin but calm and with only a torn ear to show for his run out with the local dog pack. Then comes the bit I've been expecting. Times are hard. As I can see, Kerouac's in good condition, but he's a large animal with a big Appetite. And he, Lieutenant Bow, has fed him for 49 days out of his own pocket. Daily visits by a vet have been needed and the grand total 200,000 CFA francs or 300 pounds. I don't believe for a moment that Lt. Bowe has forked out for Kerouac. I get back in the taxi, ponder my options and decide to call back Lieutenant Gaku. He's mortified because I never asked him to take me to the dog pound. But when I mention the Al Qaeda sized bounty money, he says, meet me at my office in 30 minutes. Which is how I find myself at the end of this shaggy dog story, sitting face to face with Lieutenant Gaku's boss, the director General of Mali's national Gendarmerie Colonel Diamou Keita's bread and butter. His Islamists, secessionists, suicide bombers, cocaine trafficking and murder. It's only about a dog. I stutter, feeling that I'm a canine's whisker from being locked up for wasting the gendarmerie's time. But I needn't have worried. Turns out Lt. Gaku is the Colonel's chief of protocol. Both he and his boss are proud, dog loving Malian officers of the law. An extremely brief phone call is made and I'm sent back to the K9 unit to collect Kerouac. A sheepish lieutenant bow asks me to sign a note stating that I've received the dog in good condition at no charge. Kerouac comes bounding out of his kennel and dives into the collar I've bought him. Stephan flies over from France. The two of them spend a further week with me here in Bamako before heading off to Mauritania for another on the road adventure. So perhaps not every Malian in authority is corrupt. I heard it explained to me by Chief of Protocol Gaku that we all have to find ways to survive. Some of us are better at it than others. He apparently spends more time selling second hand cars from the forecourt where Kerouac was found than minding his boss's diary. Survival, I suppose. After all, he does have eight children. And sure enough, the Lieutenant does want something for his trouble. Could I arrange for someone in Britain for a fee to foster his youngest child, 11 year old Musa? I explain that I don't think fostering works quite like that. Oh, but it does, he replies. I already have seven children studying in
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Europe, and that was Alex Duval Smith in Bamako. The Russian president Vladimir Putin, has said gay people should feel welcome at the Winter Olympic Games next month in Sochi, but they must, as he put it, leave children in peace. Mr. Putin said Russia did not ban homosexual relations, just gay propaganda to children. Russia defends its introduction of the ban as a protection of child rights, but critics believe it discriminates against sexual minorities. The ban's promise prompted widespread international calls for boycotts of the event in protest. Justin Rolatt, who's been making a television programme in the Ural Mountains, has been talking to Russians about their attitudes to homosexuality.
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Saunas are supposed to be relaxing, but the prospect of this one filled me with dread. I was to share it with two heavily armed Russian hunters. Yuri, a steely eyed veteran of Russia's bloody war in Afghanistan, and Georgi, a burly businessman who cut his teeth during the violent chaos that consumed Russia after the fall of communism. That afternoon, with the first snows of the hard Russian winter blowing in from Siberia, Yuri and Georgi had taken me into the forest. They pointed out fresh wolf and elk tracks in the snow, but there was no sign of the family of bears I'd heard live nearby. Yuri said our chatter had frightened off any game, but he let me fire a few pot shots with his formidable but fluffily named hunting rifle, a Kalashnikov Tigger. As the sun set, we dined on a great cauldron of peppery soup made with pike caught in one of the nearby lakes. They'd produced a slab of what Russians call sallow smoked pork fat, which you eat raw, washed down with shots of vodka. Russian central heating, joked Georgi as I struggled to swallow a lump of lard. The hunting lifestyle is idolized here in Russia. Russians venerate strongmen to the point where it can become almost camp. I'm sure Vladimir Putin, the famously tough Russian president, would be horrified to discover that the bare chested photos of him shooting, fishing and riding, he hopes will endear him to men like Yuri and Georgi are celebrated as homoerotic classics on gay websites in the West. One more vodka and our meal was over time, Yuri said for our sauna.
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Now.
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It is always uncomfortable undressing in front of people you hardly know. But as I slipped out of my clothes, I was feeling more than usually exposed. At first, the sauna was so hot we could barely speak. Side by side, we panted gently, listening to the rhythmic splashes as sweat dripped from our bodies. As gradually we adjusted to the heat, I decided to broach the gay issue. What did they think of this new law? I wanted to know. They were both keen supporters. Why should the gay lifestyle be celebrated? Asked Georgi. It is just disgusting. Gays should be killed, he said, frowning. I said nothing. The already humid atmosphere became even closer. They should be gassed, he muttered, staring sulkily at the floor. He seemed to find the idea of homosexuality quite repulsive. Frightening, even. I turned to Yuri, the Afghan war veteran. We didn't even know it existed when I was growing up in the Soviet Union, he said. Why would people want to do such a thing? Georgi had shown me photos of his three year old son dressed up just like dad, head to toe in combat gear and pointing a toy gun. With growing trepidation, I ask the obvious question, what if your son was gay? Now his discomfort turns to anger. That is just not possible, he says, banging a heavy fist down on the wooden bench beside me. I feel very vulnerable sitting here naked except for a towel. Time, I judge, to steer the conversation to less sensitive subjects. The money wasted on the Olympics at Sochi, corruption in the Russian state. After a few minutes, the hunters begin to relax again. What happens next with the sauna? I ask. Lie there, georgi orders me. I do as I'm told. Lying on the bench on my front, I feel a hand hitch up my towel, exposing my thighs. There's a rustle as the birch twigs are lifted from the boiling water and a faintly ominous hiss as and I'm guessing here because my eyes were firmly shut, he presses them on the hot rocks and, balanced on the drum of the sauna, there's a lovely woody smell from the boiling leaves. I gasp as he brings the scalding birch branches down on my back. He does it gently. This is not a whipping but a light spanking, and I have to admit it's rather pleasant. I try to stifle a groan of pleasure. This will get your circulation going, georgi tells me, cheerful again now. With the sauna over, we shower in icy water from the nearby lake and troop back to the main cabin. It's time for bed. We've got separate duvets, but we all share the same long platform bed. As I try to get to sleep, I can't help reflecting on the utterly unselfconscious contradiction between Georgi and Yuri's open celebration of masculinity and manifest enjoyment of male intimacy and their virulent homophobia.
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Justin Rolatt, back now from the Ural Mountains. And in one piece, too. That's it. We're back to two programmes next week on both Thursday and Saturday mornings. I hope you'll join us then. Goodbye.