← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Less Freedom, More Stability
00:28:07
Correspondents telling us more: how there's always been someone lying awake in Egypt...
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- [00:00]
Kate Adie
Hello. From the. From our own correspondence studios at Broadcasting House in London, you've downloaded the latest edition of the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
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Mark Mardell
It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Candace Piet
Hello.
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Gabriel Gatehouse
In this programme, Egyptians trade freedom for stability and prepare to vote for a former field marshal now in civilian clothes. Crucial votes elsewhere, too, a special effort required to bring in the European ballot papers from remote islands off the west coast of Ireland. And the oldest congressman in Texas flips pancakes and says at 91, he's not too old to serve the public. But first, there's deepening anger in Nigeria at the failure of the government to tackle Boko Haram, the militants behind the kidnapping of hundreds of schoolgirls and the campaign of violence spreading throughout the country. There have been claims the authorities did nothing, even though they were warned in advance there was a plan to kidnap the girls and there was to be a bombing in the central city of Jos?
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The.
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There were two huge explosions there on Tuesday, one in a bustling marketplace. Gabriel Gatehouse says few now in Nigeria believe the military can defeat Boko Haram. And there's not much optimism that the schoolgirls will be rescued either.
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The activists gather at Unity Fountain Park. It's not a park, really, but a thin strip of green in the middle of an urban highway in central Abuja. The fountain itself bears the names of the 26 states that make up this vast and diverse country. Its waterspouts stand idle and dry. You can't fault the protesters for determination. They've been coming here at 3 o' clock every afternoon since the beginning of May. They bring folding chairs and mats and bottles of water for the thirsty. A banner is unfurled from a tree. It reads, Bring BackOurGirls. The schoolgirls have been missing for nearly six weeks now. An official involved in the search told me that the chances of a successful rescue are close to zero. But at Unity Fountain, they're not giving up. On Thursday, several hundred activists marched towards the president's office. They didn't get there. They were stopped in their tracks by armed security forces. Some wondered why the military was being deployed to prevent a small group of unarmed protesters petitioning their president rather than combing the jungle for the missing schoolgirls. That same day, I'd returned from Jos, a city of a million people that lies at the heart of what's known as the Middle Belt, where Nigeria's Christians and Muslims intersect. At the market, mangled metal and charred kiosks were all that remained of a once thriving commercial district. Red Cross workers could be seen picking their way along the roof of a low building, searching for human body parts that had been flung up there. When two huge car bombs exploded in the middle of the afternoon on Tuesday, more than 120 people were killed. Boko Haram haven't said they carried out the bombing, but most assume they did. One man told me how he was serving customers in his computer shack one moment and saw his heavily pregnant wife streaming with blood the next. He was just meters away when the first bomb went off. By some miracle, both he and his wife survived. The strangest thing about the aftermath of this attack wasn't the calm and detached manner in which he described seeing the torso of a woman missing her arms, legs and head. It wasn't even the curious lack of emotion among the crowd that had gathered outside the mortuary waiting to try to identify the bodies of friends and relatives, many of whom had been burnt beyond recognition. Perhaps everyone was simply still in shock. No, the strangest thing was the total lack of any discernible reaction in the rest of the town. A day after the deadliest attack in Nigeria in recent years, life in Jos just carried on as usual. There didn't seem to be any particular tension between the city's two religious communities. Similar attacks have in the past been followed by vicious fighting between Muslims and Christians. Nor did there appear to be a significant security presence out on the streets. Perhaps that's because the army's been deployed to the northeast to search for the missing schoolgirls. Would that it were true. Earlier this week I spoke by phone to a junior officer in the Nigerian army who's posted to Borno state in the northeast, the front line of the fight against Boko Haram. He told me they'd received no reinforcements and no new orders or supplies since the military vowed to do all it could to bring the girls back home. Instead, he described a recent incident in which he and his men were ambushed. With their simple Kalashnikov rifles and just two magazines of ammunition each, they faced a numerically superior Boko Haram armed with anti aircraft guns. More than 10 soldiers were killed. The following day there was a mini mutiny back at the barracks. The soldiers apparently fired shots over the heads of their commanding officers out of sheer frustration and probably the instinct for self preservation. One well informed observer described this conflict to me as a 5th rate insurgency battling a 12th rate army. There's a real fear now that the Nigerian military might collapse in the north, and yet there seems to be little urgency on the part of the Nigerian government. The apathy is in part driven by electoral maths. The mainly Muslim north will never vote for President Goodluck Jonathan, who's a Christian from the south. In the northeast, the army has been accused of carrying out mass arrests, even killings, in response to Boko Haram's attacks. Nigeria's divide deepens with every fresh atrocity. The protesters in Abuja will be back in unity park at 3 today and tomorrow and the day after. They say they won't leave until the girls are brought back alive, but everybody knows it'll take much more than a few dozen protesters and a hashtag to defeat Boko Haram, and Unity Fountain remains stubbornly dry.
- [06:13]
Gabriel Gatehouse In Nigeria, there have been sighs of relief from some Republicans in Washington during the past week. Several big names have seen off challenges from the radical right. The US Midterm elections for Congress aren't until the autumn, but in the states, the real contest is often inside the parties. The primaries. The Tea Party candidates had been hoping for big gains, arguing some senior politicians have spent too long in Congress and aren't conservative enough. But there are several races still to be run, and next week Republican member of the House of Representatives Ralph hall will learn his fate. He's one of those accused of having spent too long in D.C. he arrived there in 1980 and at 91, is the oldest congressman ever. Mark Mardell has been to meet him in a small town in Texas.
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Mark Mardell
People stand a respectful distance back from Ralph hall as he works a spatula under the slowly solidifying batter on a big black griddle and tosses the pancake. How many of you flipped today? I ask him. Well, oh, about a thousand. Do you do this for your grandchildren? He doesn't seem to hear me, and with furrowed concentration he examines the next batch. He doesn't seem frail, and the hand flipping the pancake seems steady enough, but his age shows on his face, wrinkled and worn. This is a charity pancake breakfast in a Methodist church in the little town of Sherman, northern Texas. Ralph is the oldest congressman in the House of Representatives. Not, he tells me, just the oldest now, but ever the last record holder. Went and died when he was only 89¾, Ralph tells me with pride. He's also the last remaining World War II veteran in Congress. He was a naval fighter pilot flying missions from an aircraft carrier, and he's certainly the only member of Congress who boasts of his contact with gangsters when he was 12, making some pocket money working in a drugstore. He served Bonnie and Clyde. The papers at the time were full of pictures of the pair, so he knew exactly who they were. He tells me they ordered Cokes and cigarettes, a carton of old Golds it was. Their guns were hidden underneath newspapers. They told him to keep the $0.40 change. He muses that was a pretty good tip in those days, recalling she looked ok. He was a ratty looking guy. His advanced age makes him an easy target for the Tea Party, who have a particular dislike for those they see as career politicians who spent too long in Washington. He's clocked up 34 years in D.C. and first stood for public office 65 years ago. This former Democrat turned Republican says his old party is way too liberal now. My standard joke to Americans is that in the UK Liberal Democrat is a party, not an insult. Ralph hall has seen off one Tea Party challenge and now has their partial backing against another candidate advertising himself as the real conservative in the race. Although the midterm elections aren't until the autumn, the contests that really matter in many cases are going on now. In the primaries for the House of Representatives in particular, most seats are ultra safe, distorted into wacky shapes on the map by determined gerrymandering. Unlike in most countries, boundaries are set here by the winning political party, not by some neutral authority. Gerrymandering is an accepted fact of life rather than rather than something bordering on illegality. When the time comes for my interview with the man, nervous young aides flutter full of trepidation as we check recording levels and so on. It's as if they were handing a fragile vase to an urchin with greasy fingers. I've no idea why they seemed so concerned. I was no match for Ralph. His voice may quaver, but his political instincts, combining extreme caution with down home frankness, was spot on. Did he feel it was impertinent to be challenged in the primary? He wouldn't know how to run without the competition, he said, and his opponent was a nice guy. He went on deadpan. They need nice guys where he lives and I want to leave him where he lives. I suggested it was a difficult balancing act for Republicans here. They don't want to offend Spanish speaking voters, the new vital force in American politics. But they have to realize their core supporters want a tough line on immigration. The first people to come here, he says, were hard workers sending their salaries back to families in Mexico. He goes into an anecdote about people trying to get into the usa, standing in the middle of the Rio Grande river with their hands up as border guards discover them and then tell them to drop one hand and swear the oath of allegiance. He adds the punchline it's not going to be that easy. Again, it's a cartoonish image that scorns the idea of amnesty while putting the blame on America, not the immigrants themselves. So what about age? I love my job, I say, but I can't imagine doing it until I'm 90. He's not going to be reeled in that easily, this canny old trout. No suggestion that he does this because he likes it. Instead, he looks wistful and says, before his dear wife passed on a few years ago, her dying wish was that he should continue to serve the public. And he's carrying out that wish in her memory. And what is more, he does it for his grandkids, too. That's what it's all about, he says. The future. He ambles off to flip a few more pancakes. The oldest man in Congress, he survived Bonnie and Clyde and Japan's fighter pilots, still sharp as tin tacks. And I'm pretty sure he'll see off the challenge of that nice guy, the one who needs to stay where he lives.
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Gabriel Gatehouse
Mark Mardell in Sherman, northern Texas, the secretary general of world football's governing body, FIFA, says he expects the anti World cup protests in Brazil to continue even as the tournament gets underway next month. Jerome Walka, who was making a final inspection of the national stadium in the Capital Brasilia, said FIFA's main concern now was to ensure that fans attending the event enjoyed the experience. The protests have centred on the government spending on the tournament. Candace Piet says many Brazilians believe the authorities are investing huge sums in football while ignoring the pressing needs of the country's poor.
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Candace Piet
The old man was tiny and slight. He only had one arm. Look, he said, gesturing at the muddy field. This is where our houses were. I lived here for 40 years. I built the house myself. We've had no compensation yet I've been forced onto the streets. There are now only weeks to go before the World cup, and we were on the outskirts of Recife reporting on delays in the construction of transport links to the new stadium. The city had run out of money and has only managed to bring the promised Overground Metro 3km from the stadium. Fans are going to have to be bussed up to the gates, so the city at the last minute is building new bus terminals. Hence the removal of the old man from his house, along with 200 other families. There are similar stories in most of the World cup host cities across Brazil. We're pleased the city is hosting the World cup, said the old man. But it's all being done upside down. They should have compensated us first, moved us to new housing before leaving us destitute. As I watched two workmen with a bulldozer in the gloom of the evening, staring at a pond filled with muddy water, I thought how this planning chaos really masks a deep lack of respect for ordinary people in Brazil. Nowhere does this show itself more clearly than in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. The city's pacification program. The occupation by police of previously lawless shanty towns has begun to unravel recently, with tensions emerging, police and inhabitants. At the funeral of a young dancer from a favela near the touristy Copacabana beach, the cemetery was packed with his friends and neighbors. They accused the police of beating him to death. Outside the cemetery, groups of heavily armed police in Robocop style body armor looked on. So much of this tension between the police and poorer communities is about a lack of respect. The forces of law and order in Brazil during military rule became tools for oppression and control. And the police's attitude to the public in many states still reflects this. Many young men in the favelas of Rio report that they suffer daily humiliating body searches on the way to work and back home again. And especially now, with the World cup coming up, and the most vulnerable in Brazil are expected not to complain. Recently, an old lady I know in her 80s in so Paulo was using a pedestrian crossing on the green light when she was knocked over by a motorbike delivery boy taking lunchboxes to neighbouring offices. She broke her leg in various places, and in the end the limb had to be amputated. Her family tried to report the delivery boy to the police. The police just told them to go home, saying the old lady had not been taking enough care crossing the road. It transpired later that the delivery firm was owned by the wife of the police chief at that station. When the protests started in Brazil last year, they took the world by surprise. This is a place with 30 years of stable democracy, a country that had seemed to be booming, attracting vast sums in foreign investment, which has lifted millions out of poverty. Why on earth should it be in such social turmoil? Well, I think it's something to do with the way Brazilians suffer discrimination on a daily basis. Take the word morsu. Boy or girl, it's what many upper class people use to attract the attention of someone serving them bread at the baker's, beer in a bar, who's driving their taxi, or serving them in a shop, market or restaurant. To an outsider, it seems arrogant, almost like slave plantation talk. Some of my Brazilian colleagues, when asked about this shrug. No one seems to mind, they say. But many here are tired of the disrespect. They want more. They want justice. They want proper services in return for the high taxes they pay. Disillusionment is everywhere. Even that greatest of Brazilian icons, the footballer Pele, was booed recently by passing protesters. People criticize him now, saying he's done nothing to stand up for the rights of ordinary Brazilians. Around the world, there's talk of the resilience of the Brazilian people, and yes, you sense it in the beauty of their music, dance and extraordinary popular culture, their joyfulness, their approach to life. But if you're going to the World cup this summer, remember, Brazilians have no choice but to live with the chaos, the unfairness and the disrespect, and they simply have to make the best of it.
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Gabriel Gatehouse
And that's Candace Piet. The people of Arranmore, one of two inhabited islands off the Donegal coast, were among the first in the Irish Republic to vote in this week's European elections. The few hundred voters on the islands go to the polls early so that the wild Atlantic weather doesn't stop the ferry carrying the ballots reaching the mainland, where they'll be counted. But as Nial Ogalag has been hearing, it's not just the sea that separates some of Europe's most westerly citizens from the politicians in far off Strasbourg and
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Nial O'Gallagher
Brussels, Aran Moor is a stone skip from Ireland's northwest coast. But when the weather turns the sky the same grey as the sea, the island seems to disappear into the North Atlantic, its rocks submerging like whales, their broad backs smoothed by the pounding of the waves. Mountains of sea come through those narrows, said Phil de Hotelier. The only thing that will stop the ferry. When the chill northeast wind blows through, there's no getting back to that other island across the water. The hotel used to be the big house before this fragment of Ulster decided it had had enough of the monarchy and the rest of the landed gentry. Phil's wife, Anne Marie, proudly shows us a sepia photograph of the grand, mustachioed man who had the place before her husband's great grandfather took it over. Her collection also documents the arammore disaster some 80 years ago, when 90 men were lost at sea on the way home from navvying in Scotland. Even the priest wanted these pictures, but we wouldn't let him have them, she says. One faded image shows four sombre men in black hats coming in on a rowing boat with the Words, government visit. And that final calligraphy no one does anymore. Politicians, as Shan the fisherman, puts it, come from another planet. The same view the sheep apparently had of journalists when we drove across the island's lunar interior the night before. But then it's hard to disagree with a man who flashes a serrated gutting knife for emphasis as he talks. Shannon Lawrence, a great bald man in a hair net, trade Gaelic pleasantries as they sharpen their skills. They're spending the morning with eight of their fellow islanders in the lifeboat shed, learning to fillet and smoke their own fish so they can keep more of the money. Their instructor, Hal, a regular visitor in his butcher's apron and has come from Armagh, across the border in Northern Ireland. He's tasked with helping the local fishermen to diversify and keep their industry viable. Just bringing the fish ashore isn't enough. As the blades gleam like the silver scales of last night's haul, the reason for their low opinion of today's men in black hats shines clearly through. Since 2007, following a legal challenge by the European Commission, the Dublin government has banned the salmon fishing that has kept people on Aramore for centuries. If the nonchalance of the cormorants is anything to go by, there are plenty of fish in the sea. Cormorants aren't bound by EU directives, but that policy, aimed at conservation, has done nothing to sustain human life here. Europe is blamed for killing off this community with the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen. People in Aramore and neighbouring Torrey island vote a day before anyone else in the Irish Republic to give the ballot boxes time to reach the mainland, whatever the weather. Anger with decisions made in remote places like Brussels and Strasbourg has overshadowed these elections to the European Parliament. We follow a tip often, drive around the coast to catch Neely preparing his lobster creels. He gets €10 a kilo for his lobsters, later served up at a far higher price to diners in places like Glasgow. In the old days of mass immigration, Donegal sent even more people than fish there. And in a recurrence of the nightmare Ireland thought it had awoken from, it's now doing so again, as Glasgow Celtic football strips and Donegal Gaelic athletic shirts fly at half mast from nearby washing lines. Neely tells us when they put a stop to the salmon fishing, they put a stop to the island of Arranmore. The young people are leaving. He produces letters from two European commissioners placing the blame for the ban on politicians closer to home. The Irish government haven't been listening, he says, but they are now they have to let us fish for salmon again. The Gaelic tongue we converse in is now an official language of the European Union, whose institutions, like those of the Irish state, are committed to its conservation. But unlike the salmon, the Irish language needs people if it's to survive. Out here on Europe's edge, they vote early to make sure their votes are counted. But in this part of what was once the EU's most enthusiastic member, no one seems sure those votes will count at all.
- [22:14]
Gabriel Gatehouse
Nail o' Gallagher in Donegal. They've elections on their mind. In Egypt too, where no one seems to doubt that the former army chief Abdel Fattah Al Sisi will emerge victorious from the country's presidential election, due to go ahead on Monday and Tuesday. But some polls show that many Egyptians continue to look favourably on the man he ousted from the presidency, the Islamist Mohamed Morsi. Mr. El Sisi's interim government has cracked down firmly on Mr. Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood, branding the group a terrorist organisation. Egypt has been in turmoil for much of the past three years. There's been violence on the streets. The economy has nosedived. Kevin Connolly in Cairo says that if the former military man does win next week, it'll be because many Egyptians prize stability even above personal freedom.
- [23:06]
Kate Adie
In Egypt, it seems there has always been someone lying awake in the hot, airless night, dreading the policeman's midnight knock. It's hard to imagine it now, but once it was the old man we had come to interview. These days, straight of back and bright of eye, he's the kind of pensioner who carefully puts on a suit and neatly knots a tie before going to his favourite restaurant for coffee. He isn't the oldest person in the place. One of the waiters here started work a few months after the Battle of El Alamein. But he has seen more history than most, coursing through the streets and squares around us. He talks of his first arrest as other men might talk of a first date. He was about 16, and the police came knocking on the eve of May Day. It's not really a story of brutality. The police didn't kick the door down or beat him senseless, just locked him up for 24 hours along with a few thousand other communists, their way of making sure that the International Day of the Worker passed off quietly. The arrest didn't deter our friend from a lifetime of protest and dissent. He can remember the silent demonstration of a million men in the early 50s calling on the British to get out of Cairo and withdraw to the Suez Canal Zone. The Long column of men shuffled wordlessly through the area around Tarrier Square where the run down streets run down to the Nile, an unnerving sight for the young British national servicemen who were policing the Egyptian capital. Back in those days, the British were fighting another of those losing battles that marked the end of empire, trying to keep their grip on the canal and to prop up the tubby, hopeless, doomed young King Farouk. He was the ruler who greeted his own forced abdication with the observation that there'd soon only be five royal houses left in the world. Britons then. Hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades. His overthrow did not, of course, bring the age of dissent in Egypt to an end. Under the long rule of Egypt's military strongman, Gamal Abdel Nasser, our old friend was interned three times and was only finally freed when Nasser died. The leader did not confine himself to war on the Egyptian hard left. There was also a sustained and violent crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement born in Egypt in the time of the British. In Nasser's Egypt, the hangman and the torturer were kept busy, as well as the government censor and the secret policeman. Nasser intended to crush the Brotherhood, which in those days mixed the training of a powerful armed wing with charitable work, providing food and medical care for those poor Egyptians who were chronically let down by their state. Except the Brotherhood proved uncrushable. It melted into the background of Egyptian life, but it never went away. Which brings us to Egypt's new leader in waiting, Abdel Fattah El Sisi. Mr. Sisi is a civilian these days and in his election posters he likes to appear in sharp looking suits. But there are plenty of slightly older posters left around that remind us that he only recently hung up his field Marshal's uniform. Mr. Sisi says the Brotherhood is a terrorist organization, pure and simple, and that on his watch it will be eradicated. Its leaders are on trial and hundreds of activists have been sentenced to death. Now, some at least, of those sentences will probably be commuted. But the Sisi era is beginning with a sharp reminder that he is as ready as NASA to flex the muscles of the state. Secular activists linked to the revolution against Hosni Mubarak have found themselves in the dock too. There is a vague but unmistakable chill over Egyptian society. Political activists are a little less available to meet us these days and a little more circumspect when they do. Mr. Sisi's appeal is to those Egyptians who would accept a little less freedom for a little more stability. A dangerous but tempting trade off in a time of chaos. Our guest first demonstrated against the British in Cairo, and 60 years later he was back on the streets, denouncing Hosni Mubarak. He is too old to go in fear of the midnight policeman's knock now, but he knows that others here still do. Asked about Sisi's prospects, the old man says the new leader deserves a chance. We don't really know much, after all, about his ideas, but ask if he'll succeed where Nasser failed and deal that final historical defeat to the organization that created political Islam, and he smiles. Dissent in Egypt is a hardy perennial that can flourish even when the climate is at its harshest.
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Gabriel Gatehouse
Kevin Connolly on the vague but unmistakable chill in Cairo ahead of voting on Monday and Tuesday. And that's it. Two editions of the programme next week, on Thursday and on Saturday mornings. Until then, goodbye.