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From Our Own Correspondent
Life Support
00:27:58
Kevin Connolly has the latest from Cairo, awash with conspiracy theories after the the...
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- [00:00]
Kate Adie
Hello, this is the from our own correspondent office at Bush House in London. You can check out what we're up to by signing up to our Twitter feed, but here's a download of our latest programme on BBC Radio 4, introduced as ever by Kate Ady.
- [00:14]
BBC News Presenter
Today, ex President Mubarak of Egypt critically ill as the revolution which toppled him itself hovers between life and death. A country wide water emergency is building in India. Wells are running dry. The government's being told it must act now. These are hard times in the mining towns of Kentucky. People are starting to believe King Coal has had his day and we find out why. The coolest place to hang out in the Korean capital, Seoul, is the BBC office. The most important 48 hours in Egypt's history. That's the assessment of one Cairo newspaper this morning after the election authorities said they were delaying the announcement of the winner of the presidential election. Kevin Connolly is in the Egyptian capital this morning, where there are suspicions about the motives behind last night's announcement. Announcement and where the former president, Hosni Mubarak is in hospital, dying.
- [01:07]
Kevin Connolly
Somewhere inside the dark grounds of the military hospital, the old strongman of Egypt was facing the final certainty before which none of us is strong. Fluorescent light, yellow and muted, gleamed bleakly from a hundred windows. Rumours swirled like gusts of cigarette smoke in the midnight air, carried on the sudden breezes that were cooling Cairo after a sweltering day. Mubarak had had a heart attack, a stroke. He had no pulse. His heart had stopped and been restarted. He'd been defibrillated, medevaced, intubated, ventilated. He was brain dead, clinically dead, just dead. Slowly it became clear that he was paused somewhere between life and death, just as the country he led for so long found itself suspended between autocracy and democracy. The tough, brilliant old general who shaped and directed the old system appeared to be ending his days as a kind of metaphor for it. The word that his chronic ill health had slipped into crisis came at the end of a febrile day in Cairo. It had been hot, nearly 40 degrees, and a thick cloud of dusty air had sat on the city all day like a fat man squashing down on an air cushion. As day gave way to night, Tahriyeh Square beside the Nile in the centre of the city, began to fill with supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood claiming victory in the first free presidential elections in Egypt's history. As Egypt's creaking democratic machinery prepared to crank out the final official results of the elections, a separate political process conducted in parallel by the army. And the Constitutional Court was reaching a few conclusions of its own. Parliament, elected last November and dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, was dissolved. The generals, who were finding having control over every area of Egyptian life a hard habit to break, will have a big say in the future constitution. And they have the power of arrest and detention again. It feels like a kind of creeping slow motion military coup, albeit a very postmodern one, which involves announcements on social networking sites rather than tanks on the lawn. The army, of course, says it's no such thing. There will be fresh parliamentary elections at some point and a new constitution and power will be handed over to the new president on time at the end of the month. But the generals will retain huge influence, even if they take off their uniforms and wear suits while they're exercising it. Everyone has their favourite point of historical comparison. Portugal in 1974, Turkey in the 1980s and Pakistan in the 1990s are analogies I've heard for countries where men in uniform were more important than men in office. Of course, simply holding elections was never going to turn Egypt into Sweden or Switzerland overnight. The roots of military influence are too deep for that. And in the minds of many Egyptians, there's a further issue too. Political Islam is the clear overall winner of this country's first experiment with proper democracy. The Muslim Brotherhood has been at pains to present a non threatening face to the rest of Egyptian society. But its opponents have lots of unanswered questions about what Islamist rule might ultimately mean. Segregated schools and beaches, headscarves and veils for women? Ban on the sale of alcohol. Perhaps Egypt went directly from having no democracy at all to having a fatiguing and confusing amount of it. Egyptians have been asked to vote on 25 occasions in the last 15 months, using a parliamentary system that would have taxed the understanding of a Panorama pundit. By the second round of the presidential election, turnout was down to 50% and the winning candidate got a whisker over 50% of that. Hardly a mandate for permanent and profound social change. Lots of Egyptians might be secretly glad the army is there to limit the powers of the presidency, even if they know that doesn't sound terribly democratic. It seems unlikely that Hosni Mubarak, ailing and in his mid-80s, will live to see how it all works out. So in the end, the analogy between his health and the system he created doesn't quite hold up. There is a certainty about the fate that ultimately awaits him and the rest of us, of course, even if he can't know when the end will come. The system he created is on a life support machine operated by the Egyptian army. No one can tell when that might be switched off or what will happen when it is.
- [05:53]
BBC News Presenter
And that was Kevin Connolly. India is gripped by a growing water crisis. Many major rivers are contaminated by pollution, and falling levels of groundwater means wells are running dry. The main opposition party, the bjp, says the government's failing to get water to the people who need it most. It's planning a protest march on the Prime Minister's office in the capital, Delhi, tomorrow. India now has a population of more than a billion people, and almost a third of them live in poverty, many without sanitation and regular water supplies. Jill McGivering has been travelling across northern India investigating poor Namba has a round,
- [06:32]
Jill McGivering
gentle face, partly hidden by owlish glasses. Her bright orange sari, the prayer beads round her neck and the streak of ash on her forehead mark her out as a young woman in holy orders. She has renounced the world to dedicate herself to Hinduism. But now a crisis has erupted which is compelling her to speak out in public. I met her in one of India's holiest places, the Ghats at Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges. Like many in India, she reveres the river, describing it as her mother. When I bathe in its waters, she says, it's as if my mother is reaching out and embracing me in her arms. But it's clear as we look out together over the water that this is a mother whose health is so critical she looks close to death. The water level has fallen dramatically in recent years. Half a dozen funeral pyres burn on the water's edge. The remains of these bodies will end up in the water. People are bathing alongside piles of rotting rubbish and pipes pump a constant stream of untreated sewage into the water. In the heat, the stench is revolting. Puranamba looks distressed as she compares the state of the Ganges today with the river she remembers fondly from childhood. We want the government to stop building dams, she says. They're stopping the natural flow of the river and they must do something to clean up the water. The Ganges is hailed as a national treasure. Its sorry state is a reflection of a much broader water crisis, which is fast becoming a country wide emergency. The water table is falling year by year. I travelled out along bumpy roads to villages in Rajasthan where the wells have simply run dry. The farmers club together to pay for tankers to bring in water from outside. They spend a fifth of their income now just on water. There's no water to irrigate the fields, so they only sow their crops once a year in the rainy season. All this pushes them deeper into poverty and fuels migration to the cities. In another village, a woman with a silver nose ring and brightly coloured sari showed me how to haul up a bucket from the large community well. The water level has steadily dropped. We had to lower the bucket at least 20 metres to fill it. And the water we drew, she said, gave them stomach problems for the first time. Old people here are feeling pain in their bones and have bent limbs. They put down to the poor quality of the water. When the villagers head to the cities, they find similar problems there too. I spent a day in Delhi's slums, rows of shelters built from brick, cement and sheets of corrugated iron. A young girl crouched beside a small fire, flattening balls of dough between her palms and making bread. Behind her, a toddler begged her mother for a cup of water. Then, balancing over the open drain, she rinsed her mouth and rubbed her teeth clean with her finger. Water is so precious in the slums that it spawned a growing black market run by gangs. I went to see a bore well, a standpipe set up by the government to provide free water. Instead, it had been commandeered by a gang and linked to a spaghetti junction of dozens of pipes. Each pipe runs to a particular home and its water flow is controlled by a valve. Hundreds of families subscribe to the gang's illegal water system. They sign up for 15 or 20 minutes of water a day at a cost per minute. It gives the racketeers money and power over the whole community. Nearby, government toilet blocks stand idle. They've never been used because the supply of water to them has also been diverted for drinking. Despite its low quality, everyone here uses the open air as a common lavatory. Their untreated waste sinks into the ground and further contaminates the water supply. So what should the government do? It's a matter of fierce debate. They've already built large dams which divert water to major cities like Delhi. But these displaced tens of thousands of people and altered the flow of major rivers, including the Ganges. There's so much opposition to these dam projects that that future plans have been put on hold. In the meantime, many in Delhi's slums rely on tankers for their supplies. They pour into the street armed with buckets, pots and plastic bottles. As soon as they appear, water sprays everywhere. Old and young, men and women jostle and fight to grab the hoses. A tanker carrying 800 litres of water empties in six or seven minutes. On the other side of the road, middle class families watch the scrum from smart apartment blocks. Large storage tanks on their roofs are comfortably full. The rich use on average 10 times more water than the poor. They wash cars, water, gardens, even fill swimming pools. While in slums and villages, India's poor are getting increasingly thirsty.
- [11:49]
BBC News Presenter
And that's Jill McGivering. Delegates at the United nations conference in Rio are talking about energy supplies and what will still be around to power the world in the years ahead. In the United States, coal, which once fired the nation to industrial prosperity, has fallen from favour. These days there's an abundance of natural gas. It's cheaper to extract, cleaner, more efficient. But while some profit from this, others are feeling the pinch. Johnny Dimon's been to Kentucky, once a coal rich state, but now fallen upon hard times.
- [12:22]
Kate Adie
Everything we have ever done, said the county judge, has come from coal. He sat white haired, clear eyed, 18 years in post in the office of his city counterpart, the mayor. As both of them explained the trouble this part of east Kentucky is in. You could smell the trouble on the way into the city of Hazzard. An abandoned diner sat forlornly by the side of the road, followed by a long closed restaurant mocked by its sign extolling river views, followed by a deserted petrol station. Pumps removed a patch of concrete and an awning slowly being reclaimed by nature. Up the hill on the way to Main street, there was one sign of life at 9:30 in the morning, fluorescent lettering flashing in a shop window. A flicker of movement within. Dispensary, a rusted sign declared, swinging slightly in the breeze. Whiskey, said the word above it. Unlit for the moment, perhaps waiting for the night to come. It was a liquor store. Alcohol was piled up to the ceiling. Cigarettes were advertised by price and special offer. A rack of girly magazines waited for an impulse buyer. To one side of the counter, copies of High Times, the journal of the discerning marijuana grower. So much sin in such a small space. The man behind the counter gave directions to a diner without looking up. Railways, railroads, if you're an American, criss cross the smaller byways of east Kentucky. The car goes bump, bump over the level crossing as the rails rumble beneath the wheels, a small part of the state's industrial history slips by. Coal has been dug out of the mountains around here since time began. But industrial extraction needed capital and transport. The railroad came to hazard a hundred years ago. The other day they commemorated the first train's arrival. The mayor's parents came to the city in the 30s. They were hard times, to be sure, but her father, a doctor, could see that a boom was coming. And it did, she said, her memory wandering back to her school that sent students off to Harvard and Wellesley, to music lessons and ladies lunches, to the main street bustling with commerce. It's all dependent on coal, she says. That was the resource. There's gas and oil, logging and water. But coal is what it all depends on. She is 84 years old, petite and smiling, her hair golden blonde, pulled back on her head. Her son in law works for the railroad. He tells her the bad news once 20 or 30 trainloads of coal left Hazard every day. A seemingly never ending line of rust brown cars loaded high with the stuff. Now just three loads a day leave town. A warm winter and a cool summer have cut demand. Getting permits for new mines is proving mighty hard, and America is suddenly awash with cheap natural gas. All of a sudden, coal feels like last century's fuel. Where that leaves this part of the Appalachian Mountains is difficult to say. For centuries, the people of the Appalachians were feared, derided and ignored in equal measure. Isolated by the mountains, they were feisty and independent, often pushing back against a federal government that appeared to tax their leisure pursuits, mainly drinking, and give little in return. Coal brought good jobs and schools and hospitals, a decent if not extravagant life for families. It poisoned the water and befouled the air too. But maybe that was the price to pay. Nothing feels as if it has ever come easy to the Appalachians. The people are still feisty, flailing at the bureaucrats in Washington with their environmental rules and the attempts by liberals in New York and Los Angeles to get the nation to move beyond coal. Who's going to build a factory here? They ask, pointing to the mountains that cut them off from the rest of the world and leave no flat land spare for the shopping centres, golf courses and 12 lane highways that the rest of America takes for granted. Next to the neat red brick of City hall, the cool gray stone of a war memorial framed by the dark green mountains, commemorated the first and Second World War, Korea and Vietnam, the names of the fallen and an inscription written by the mayor's husband himself, the mayor until his passing. May the memories of these servicemen, it reads, who made the supreme sacrifice in the service of our country, be as eternal as as the mountains from whence they came. Beneath the memorial a river runs, and all around it trees sway on the mountains that shape the land and lives of the people that live here.
- [16:59]
BBC News Presenter
Johnny diamond in Kentucky The Central African state of Chad is a nation whose post independence history has been marked by instability and violence. Tension continues today between the mainly Muslim Arab north and the predominantly Christian and animist south. It's also a poor country. Health and social conditions don't compare well with those elsewhere in the region. But perhaps times are beginning to change. Chad has gold and uranium reserves and has now begun to profit from oil as well. Celeste Hicks, our correspondent in the Capital Jamena in 2010, has just been back to see if there have been developments.
- [17:37]
Celeste Hicks
Strange how once a place has changed, it's almost impossible to imagine how it was before. So it was when I arrived back in Chad after a two year absence. I knew, or at least I thought I knew, that the Palais rose home to President Idris Debi. Itno was parallel to the airport, but everything seemed completely distorted now that the old centre of Jemaina, a large gendarmerie barracks which back in the day was frequented by hundreds of young and often mean looking soldiers, has been demolished and replaced with the impressive Place de la Nation. My Chadian friend Nelly's old car rattles and shakes as we sweep past the shiny new triumphal arch which stands at one end of the place opposite the Presidential palace. By the way, what happened to that good old car I sold you when I left? I ask. She laughs and says it blew up. The Place de la Nation really is an amazing sight. It's home to a number of giant TV screens, a proud fluttering Chadian tricolour flag a and bronze statues depicting freed slaves and the country's most famous wildlife, including, weirdly, a squirrel. I look back over the boulevard and try to remember what used to be there. The scorching midday sun is causing heat waves to rise from the new tarmac. I can barely picture the muddy and dirty warren of streets that once stood here. It's not without irony that the legs of the triumphal arch on the place stand almost exactly at the point which rebels reached in the city center when they came within hours of toppling President Debbie back in 2008. When I first arrived in Chad, not long after, the city was in virtual lockdown with gangs of soldiers riding around with sprays of rocket propelled grenades hanging off the back of their Land Cruisers. Roadblocks were everywhere, and it was not uncommon to be stopped in the dead of night and forced to stand in the street while some drunken soldier rummaged through the glove compartment searching for a problem with my papers. Chadian television repeatedly showed pictures of the bloodied and miserable faces of captured rebels while their leaders issued defiant statements almost every week. Four years later, and it's clear the President wants to show that the rebellion has been defeated and that he's firmly back in control, Debbie has gone all out to complete his project of transforming Jermainea from a dusty, unknown backwater with an unpronounceable name to what he's calling the shop window of Africa, using the huge reserves of cash the country has earned in the last 10 years. Since the beginning of an oil extraction project, the city has seen startling changes. And not just around the Place de Lanacion. Two thirds of roads have been paved since 2008. A new maternity hospital has sprung up and most of the government departments boast new headquarters in a variety of pastel shades, no doubt shocked by the speed with which his seemingly indestructible on off buddy, Colonel Gaddafi, was disposed of last year by a wave of popular protest. President Debbie's calculation must be that if he can give a physical demonstration of the benefits of his tenure over the oil project, he becomes more secure. His deal to produce petrol for domestic consumption at a new Chinese owned refinery has dramatically reduced the price of petrol at the pump. But this doesn't wash with many ordinary Chadians. It's just superficial, says my friend Nelly. What we really need is investments in education and health. Nothing much has changed. We're sitting on one of the park benches which overlook the Place de la Nation, eating pistachio ice creams. We've had to park the car by the side of the road for a few minutes because the engine has overheated. Two entrepreneurial young men have arrived to hose down the engine with water they've pumped from the Cherry River. She's right. The energetic new building spree does little to improve people's real lives in one of the world's poorest countries. Three times in the last eight years, Chad has been hit by terrible food shortages caused by poor and unpredictable rains. This year, more than 3 million people are thought to be affected. And there's been a huge increase in the number of people turning up at centres treating hungry babies. A presidential election was boycotted last year by opposition leaders who called it a farce. Debbie won with some 83% of the vote. The literacy rate is just 34%. And the country which was once British polio free is now currently suffering one of the world's worst outbreaks of the disease. Some things really do take a long time to change.
- [22:32]
BBC News Presenter
Celeste Hicks in Chad, now declining dress standards is a perennial topic as popular with the older generation Today, as it's always been, one theme laments the informality of it all. These days, men don't wear ties anymore, even at work. As for women, whatever happened to hosiery? Hats, gloves? One of the correspondents we had on last week told us the priest he'd gone to meet was wearing a hoodie. Omg. Well, in Korea at the moment, it's high summer and they're feeling the heat. But there, as Lucy Williamson's been learning, people prefer to stay buttoned up. Dressing down is a risky business.
- [23:11]
Lucy Williamson
It's probably the first time anyone has ever described a BBC office as heaven. My friend sat sprawled on the sole bureau's ancient couch, soaking up the tepid air conditioning, sinking into a mass of newspapers with a sigh of pleasure. Seriously, he said, this is heaven. I'd love to report that it was my stimulating conversation that prompted this accolade. It wasn't. It was the temperature. My friend, you see, works for the government, and the air conditioning in all government offices here remains resolutely off during South Korea's sweaty summer months until the temperature tops 28 degrees C. Celsius. That's 28 degrees inside the building or around 30 outside. All a bid to combat electricity shortages, which last summer led to blackouts in major cities and red faces in the cabinet room. This government prides itself on its green policies, and it's also heading into a presidential election campaign. And so the summer rules are being applied more rigorously than ever this year in Seoul's humid climate. That makes for some very uncomfortable and, it's been hinted, aromatic working conditions for ministers and their staff. Hence my friend's reluctance to leave the BBC's rather tatty couch. To get around the problem, the president has applied summer dress codes, a relaxation of the dark suit and white shirt uniform worn by almost every salaryman in Seoul. In the president's office, jackets and ties may now be discarded, and short sleeved coloured shirts are allowed, as are jeans, as long as they're not blue or decorated or torn. The summer rules are nothing if not specific. The president himself has been setting an example by conducting cabinet meetings in his shirt sleeves, a shocking state of undress for a Korean president. Seoul's mayor has gone one step further this year and told his staff they're free to wear shorts and sandals to work. Shorts and sandals. Korean news photographers waited eagerly outside City hall this month to catch the bare legs of its civil servants entering a government office. They struggle to find just two. My couchsurfing friend thinks people simply feel uncomfortable Showing their legs in the office. This is still a very stiff and conservative culture, he says. The few that do try it get odd looks from others. People think it's weird. Habits here are hard to break. Despite their leader's example, senior officials in the President's office are still walking around in suit jackets, even in the sauna like conditions. One of the President's staff told me the older men had complained that T shirts and jeans left them nowhere to put their wallet. The real reason may be more complex, a fear that dressing down in front of their junior colleagues might diminish their authority. Dress codes are important here, a way of marking authority or just blending in. One government employee told me how she used to tailor her outfit as she travelled between her home and her university. The place where she lived was smart and moneyed, her campus hippie and grungy. To look out of place was unthinkable, and so she would change her clothes twice a day on the journey out and the journey back, just to blend in. Now she's all grown up and a senior civil servant, and the rules are just the same. No one removes their jacket before the boss, she says, no matter how hot it gets. So instead, government employees are finding other ways around the problem of overheating this summer. One of them, clearly, is hanging out at the BBC. Another is sneaking an electric fan onto your desk for personal use, which, as it has to be plugged into the electricity supply, sort of defeats the object of the whole energy saving exercise. But it's become so common that at least one ministry sends inspectors round on a regular basis to check for unofficial cold air supplies and confiscates the offending articles. The President, I'm told, doesn't really feel the heat, though I do remember last winter when the temperature dipped to minus 18 degrees, reading in the paper that he had adopted thermal underwear and found it very effective. Winter, you see, is just the same. Government officials sit at their desks wrapped in blankets, coats and gloves, running fan heaters as the building's radiators stay resolutely off. So when it gets cold again, round about October, I'll expect my friend back once more, nestled amongst the newspapers on the BBC couch.
- [27:44]
BBC News Presenter
The BBC. It's hot and it's cool. There's a sofa, there are papers. No wonder it's popular. Lucy Williamson there, bringing today's edition to a close. I'll be here again on Saturday morning with more dispatches from far and wide. I hope you'll do. Join us.