← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Mar 10, 2011
00:28:17
Michael Buchanan goes behind the front lines in the rebel city of Benghazi in Libya at...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent. You can hear the version of the programme broadcast on the World Service by following the link to the iplayer on the top of our website.
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To keep up with our latest reports
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and get a sneak preview of the stories, you can sign up to our Twitter feed as well. But now, with the edition Broadcast on
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Radio 4, here's Kate Ady.
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Today, talk of fighting and freedom. In the oldest coffee shop in Benghazi, the dark clouds gathering over Ivory Coast. Our man there laments the turmoil in a land once known for its hospitality and peace. A million Cubans prepare for life outside state employment. We meet one who thinks the future is in pizza. And coming soon to a concert hall near you. The Congolese musicians playing their way out of poverty and onto the world stage. Forces loyal to the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi have been engaged in a major offensive against rebels in the west of the country, near the capital Tripoli. Reliable information from the scene has been scarce. Journalists have been prevented from visiting the area. In another appearance on state television, the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi accused the west of wanting to seize Libya's oil, and he warned that imposing a no fly zone on his country would backfire. The eastern city where the revolt began, Benghazi, is, for the time being at least, well away from the front line. And Michael Buchanan says many there are still revelling in their newfound freedom.
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I was travelling around Benghazi early the other morning, my first full day in the city. As we neared a roundabout, my bleary focus was sharpened by the sight of a small Toyota pickup truck approaching from the right. What piqued my interest was not the vehicle per se, but the fact that perched on the back was a large machine gun pointing skywards. Thankfully, the conflict that I had previously only seen and heard about seemed very real. A closer look at the truck revealed that it had no number plates. My interpreter, far wiser to the subtleties of Benghazi than I, said that it was probably one of the hundreds of imported vehicles that had been sitting by the dockside when the fight had started and had now been appropriated by the rebels. He gave me a tab of all the illicit goods one can now acquire here. Around US$3,000 will buy you a top of the range imported car, a few hundred dollars for a Libyan passport, with a European made handgun costing about the same. Benghazi at the moment is a city of opportunities if you know the right people. I was actually travelling to get my media accreditation, which seems bizarre given the haphazard nature of authority in the city. But Libyans don't seem to work much in the early morning, so the press centre was shut. The driver suggested we pop into a local cafe while we waited, but not just any cafe. He took me to Ticas. The place is spartan, about half a dozen small wooden tables encircled by cheap green plastic chairs. The menu is simple, it sells strong shots of Arabic coffee. The walls are covered in black and white pictures of Benghazi from the 1950s. But the cafe actually dates back to 1938. It is in fact the oldest coffee shop in the city and it is undoubtedly the best place I've found to learn the stories and secrets of Benghazi. There is a constant din of conversation which spills out onto the street as customers who can't fit inside smoke and drink outside. Before the revolt, people only talked about football, Apparently. Now all they discuss is fighting and freedom. The recent advances by Colonel Gaddafi's forces are not overly concerning the locals. The beauty of Benghazi at the moment is that everyone wants to give you their opinion, in some cases literally queuing up to talk to you. I squeezed into a spot by the counter and was almost immediately joined by Osman Madawi. Most of his front teeth are missing, he's got a wispy grey beard. And While he's officially 56, he says he was reborn February 17, the day the Libyan revolt started. Previous to then, he says he felt that this was not his country. I felt like an animal, he continues, liable to be taken away at any moment for any reason. He was specific about when he decided that Colonel Gaddafi was not right for Libya. January 1976, when several protesters, including a couple of friends, were hanged from Benghazi lamp posts. All that has now changed, says Osman. I don't throw anything away. I tidy my street. I am now a human being. One of the staff overhearing our conversation says the air is now clear in Benghazi. The rains came and washed away the old senses, the old ways of thinking. They also appear to have washed away almost all Gaddafi supporters in eastern Libya. Less than a month ago, they ran the entire country. Now they're as rare as hen's teeth in this part of Libya. Another Tika customer, Sala Yousef, a retired Air Force pilot who has enlisted as a member of the anti Gaddafi rebel Army, told me that those who hadn't fled were being carefully watched. They don't answer the door, they hide, he says, heavily armed. Now is not the time for them, says Saleh. We have to push towards Tripoli. When the time comes, we'll deal with them. How? I wondered. We'll have to kill them, he replies nonchalantly. Or many of them. At least a few weeks ago, such talk may well have seen both men arrested in the middle of the night. Osman, for instance, spent five days in prison, he told me, for standing beside someone who made an anti regime remark. And he was by no means the only Tika customer who disappeared following seemingly innocent conversations over their shots of caffeine. The cafe's patrons, all men, mostly elderly, are childlike in their enthusiasm to talk about everything and anything. And like children, they're learning a new language, that of a people no longer afraid to speak their minds.
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Michael Buchanan in Benghazi, the United nations refugee agency says hundreds of thousands of people in Ivory coast have been displaced by the fighting between supporters supporters of the two men claiming to be president. The UNHCR says that over the last three months up to 300,000 have left their homes in the port city of Abidjan, and getting help to those that need it is proving increasingly difficult. Although Alasan Ouattara is regarded internationally as the winner of the election, his rival, Laurent Gabagbo, has refused to leave office. John James in Abidjan says what started as a political crisis has turned into a disaster for Ivory Co.
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The thick mahogany doors of the mansion stand ajar as young children run in and out. A trail of odd junk litters the yard. A small upturned table here, papers there, the walls blackened by fire. A palatial home ransacked earlier by youths. The police had been there already, eyewitnesses said, not to stop the theft but to load up their vehicles with the loot. An estimated 20 homes belonging to government ministers and their supporters were attacked last weekend in Abidjan. The mistake these politicians made was to win November's election and then to insist that winning a vote meant you get to take over. The former president didn't like that. The new government may be able to shelter under UN protection at a lagoonside hotel, but their homes, cars and families are fair game for the old government. This was a part of Africa that didn't need handouts to develop just a few decent politicians. Instead, it seen a race to the bottom for power at any price, with the very real threat of a return to civil war. Ivorians witnessed the destruction with shock and incredulity. My friend Bernard's work is linked to the port. He's lost his job, as has everyone at his company, because almost nothing is being shipped anymore. Another friend, odd has lost her job running a restaurant. Few people eat out anymore. In what was once one of Africa's culinary capitals. The central bank closed a month and a half ago, private banks three weeks ago. The destructive rage is almost a madness, emptying the army ammunition stores to hand out Kalashnikovs to unemployed youths whipped up into anger by their patron's propaganda, Each side using foreign mercenaries, then accusing the other side of using foreign support. At one of the city's many checkpoints, I'm ordered out of the car as young men with guns search for weapons. They say they're doing their civic duty by blocking the flow of arms, but I've never heard of them finding any. And the only civilians illegally carrying arms I've seen were the ones running the roadblocks. Both sides have burnt their victims alive. You burn one, we'll burn 10, said one Gbagbo supporter at a barricade in Yopungo. In one chilling video, a pile of bodies writhe in pain after a beating. Burning tires and tables are placed on top of them to form an evening bonfire. The police, clearly in shot, actually help out the crowd. Images of the violence, taken with mobile phone cameras are everywhere at the moment. YouTube offers up a daily collection of horrors from Ivory Coast. The families burn during an attack on their village. The women, out protesting peacefully for change mown down by cannon fire from a convoy of government vehicles, leaving seven dead. Armed youths threatening death to the other side. Tens of thousands have fled Ivory coast as the Pro Watara forces in the north start to move south. In Abidjan, an armed group in the northern suburb of Abobo, nicknamed the Invisible Commandos, has made the district a virtual no go area for the national security Forces, which which are still publicly loyal to Lauren. A generation ago, if you'd asked a West African to think of a country that meant stability and prosperity, the answer would have been Ivory Coast. At one prayer meeting, I hear a woman cry out to God for a return to the times when this was a land of hospitality and peace. This is the country where I work, but it's also now home. I've lived here for more than three years. My wife is Ivorian, and only recently I picked up my own Ivorian passport, so so am I. At the same time, I bought a house. This remains a place of friendly people. Amazing fresh fruits, long and unspoiled tropical beaches. And yes, it ought to have a bright future. But at the moment, the place is being held hostage, and there seem to be more atrocities committed every day. I wonder where my family should evacuate. The dark clouds seemed to be gathering. Ivorians wanted one president, but they got two. They wanted peace and they got war. They were promised debt relief, but instead the country defaulted on its debt. They wanted prosperity and the economy shut down. There's an important word here that I've never found the equivalent for in English. Yao. It's a deeply felt way of saying I'm so sorry. Ivory Coast
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John James There the island of Cuba is often seen abroad as a paradise of sun, sea and salsa. But behind the stereotypes, there's a shabbier reality, with many people struggling to eke out meagre salaries. The old Soviet joke they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work is still very current there. The Cuban economy is in a deep hole. After 40 years of old fashioned centralized state planning, the government of President Raul Castro has been trying to get this sputtering engine going again with plans to sack up to a million state workers and get them into self employment. But carrying out such radical economic change is not that easy. The President has admitted it might take as many as five years for his reforms to work. But meanwhile, as Polly Hope's been observing, Cubans are plunging into the world of commerce with enthusiasm.
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My friend Junior lives in a solar or tenement yard off a side street in Havana. It's a higgledy piggledy crush of cramped apartments squeezed around the long crumbling concrete passageway. Eunor, who's a lanky, smiley guy in his late 20s, lives in a flat right at the end. So to get there you pick your way past a scary tangle of bare electric wires feeding into the subdivided rooms and an unmarked hole which opens straight into the yard's shared water cistern, some scrawny, spiteful cats, and a table full of very noisy domino playing men. It's not exactly a prime retail location, but it's Unio's new commercial hq because he's just set up as a self employed businessman, a cuenta proprita. He's selling pizza. Cuban pizza is isn't much like its Italian ancestor. It usually has a really thick doughy crust, a scanty smear of oddly sweet red sauce, and a thick blanket of melted processed cheese. It definitely never features olive oil or basil or spicy sausage, but it's very popular, on sale all over the island at more or less any time of day, and unusual because Cubans both like it and can afford it. Since the early 1990s, salaries here have been so low that many Cubans have really been surviving on other sorts of income, receiving money from family abroad or doing Extra work on the side or simply by pilfering goods from their workplaces to sell on the black market. It's not your take home pay that matters, they joke more. What else you can take home with you? The government, which still employs more than 80% of Cuba's workforce, wants to put a stop to all that and to cut much of the red tape which still bogs down anything to do with work or business on the island. It has plans to let go more than a million workers, hoping they'll all go self employed. When I walked by the nearest offices of the Onat, Cuba's work and Taxation office, there was a crush of applicants for self employment licenses, more than 50 people deep. Most of them were going into catering, always the obvious small business plan. But there are others, like the pirated disc vendors whose stands are everywhere now, groaning with DVDs crammed with no less than five films apiece. There are legions of hairdressers and manicurists, stalls of carefully worked but mostly pretty tacky souvenirs and knick knacks and some truly eccentric business propositions. One cheerful housewife I've met really seemed to believe there'd be a market for her hand knitted woolly scarves. Unior's pizzas cost a little over the average if you want one loaded contolo with everything, but the neighbours say they're worth it. And unlike the staff in Cuban state run restaurants, Unior is a caring caterer. If you want some slices of green pepper or a bit of sweet corn on your pie, then he'll run from door to door asking the neighbours who are his usual customers, if they can spare him some. But for most of his raw materials, he still has to buy at the state shops where prices are sky high or use stolen supplies from the black market. Amid the yard's never ending gossip, I hear complaints that the new ventures are being throttled by a long and baffling list of regulations about what you can sell and where and when, about who else you can employ and how you should pay them, and crucially, about how much tax will be raked off any profits. Most of the entrepreneurs have never had to calculate a percentage or tot up running costs before. When I asked him, Junior had no idea whatsoever of his profit margin per pizza or how much his next electricity bill might be. His wife has just had a baby, so when I visit him the next day, his oven is taking a rare break from the incessant baking. Just as well, since he looks a bit green and calls urgently for a shot of rum for breakfast to combat his raging hangover. Although the nausea doesn't stop him smoking a festive cigar. Dozens of neighbours stop by, every single one wishing him felicidades, Papa. Congratulations, dad. The older ladies in the yard are worried that this sort of close, tight knit daily togetherness convivencia is soon going to disappear as the new competitiveness takes hold. One convinced that most of the new businesses will soon go bust tells me this plan is just Ponedresi setting the puppies to fight among themselves. For her, there's no doubt the state is still the biggest dog in Cuba's economic arena by far.
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And that's Polly Hope. The new government of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine has opened criminal investigations into the activities of the former prime minister, Prime Minister and a number of her colleagues. The former premier Yulia Timoshenko, says it's all a case of political revenge by the new president to whom she lost in last year's presidential elections. Both the United States and the European Union have raised concerns over what they've called selective justice. In Ukraine, five years after the so called Orange Revolution supposedly ushered in democracy, Daniel Sanford's been to this former Soviet republic to take its political temperature.
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I had been travelling through Ukraine for the best part of two weeks. The aim of the journey was to try and make sense of a country that appeared so keen to embrace the west only a few years ago, but turned its back on the Orange Revolution last April when it elected the more pro Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych as president. In the end, what helped clear the fog in my mind was a chance encounter. On a day when the first spring sunshine was breaking through the grey of winter and getting to work on the laborious process of melting the many layers of snow. I met a man with a weather beaten face who can claim to be Ukraine's first ever citizen. Sarkis was a government chauffeur who in early 1992 was responsible for an important consignment. He was driving officials from the Donetsk region who were going to Kiev to collect the newly produced stamps that would convert Soviet passports into Ukrainian ones. These were the heady days after the breakup of the Soviet Union when anything seemed possible. When they arrived in the capital, the bureaucrats wanted to try out their new stamps and Sakis volunteered his passport can lee. He then asked for a certificate to confirm that his was the first ever identity document to be converted. The story intrigued me. Here was a man who enthusiastically embraced his new Ukrainian identity two decades ago. How did he feel about it now. So as he drove me from interview to interview over the next two days, I gently probed his background. It turned out that Sarkis was not an ethnic Ukrainian at all, nor even a Russian. He was an Armenian, a citizen of the Soviet Union who had found himself washed up in Ukraine as Stalin's empire receded. He'd been a brave citizen too. A Soviet soldier in Afghanistan in the early 1980s, he'd been captured by the Mujahideen. They put him to work in the fields, but he killed his guards and escaped with the dead body of his commander, who'd been left by their captors to die in a pit. On his return to his unit, he was tortured by the KGB on suspicion of collaborating with the enemy, before eventually being cleared as a patriot and awarded for his gallantry. Sakis stories just kept on coming. He was a rally driver who had won the Ukrainian championship, but he turned down the opportunity to compete for the Soviet title because it clashed with his chance to drive a new Volvo truck on a long distance journey into the West. It was something no self respecting lorry driver, more used to lower quality Soviet trucks, was going to miss. Sakis is an enterprising man, and when the Soviet Union broke up and he found himself as a citizen of Ukraine, he took the opportunity to start his own business. In order to give his wife and two daughters a higher standard of living, he set up an import company, using his sister in Greece to source products for the Ukrainian market. It was soon a thriving business. But like so many entrepreneurs in corruption racked Ukraine, Sarkis fell foul of bent bureaucrats in his case, tax inspectors who expected a cut of his profits to line their own pockets. Convinced that he was in the right, he fought them in the courts. As his case made its way through the legal system, his fine grew to the equivalent of almost half a million pounds. But he was undeterred and eventually the government settled out of court, agreeing to waive the fine. Now he's suing them for the damage the corrupt officials did to his business. In the meantime, in order to earn a living, he's back driving again, spending his days at the wheel of a taxi with a cracked windscreen. His dreams of a new life almost extinguished by the suffocating corruption that has smothered Ukraine and many other parts of the former Soviet Union. Sakis optimism about his new nation has been severely dented. And that's why he and many other Ukrainians have turned their backs on the Orange Revolutionaries who had promised so much. What should be done about it? I asked. We should get Stalin back, he said, but just for one year. I think he was joking, but I'm still not sure.
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Daniel Sanford Generally, stories emerging from the Democratic Republic of Congo are about conflict, corruption, poverty and suffering. Today, though, we have a rather more uplifting tale about a band of disabled musicians who are taking their music from the back streets of the capital, Kinshasa, onto the world stage. In May, they'll be bringing their music to concert halls here in Britain. Johnny Hogg's been to meet them.
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Kinshasa Zoo is a strange setting for a fairy tale. A colonial relic, it sits crumbling in the heat, its dilapidation almost total. The sparse grass is strewn with rubble and dotted with tiny, rusting cages where emaciated animals, monkeys eat eagles. Even leopards are held like prisoners in public cells, pacing bare concrete or sheltering from the sun under scraps of corrugated iron. A miserable place, it seems an appropriate metaphor for the Congolese capital, where much of the human population, too, is trapped in a world of almost unimaginable hardship. But it was in the zoo that Congo's latest remarkable musical offering. Staff Bender Bilili rehearsed and recorded recorded their album using stolen electricity and accompanied by a backing chorus of croaking frogs and car horns. The story of Staff, as the band is known, has captured the world's imagination. They are a group of disabled musicians and street kids who sing about their lives in this vast African city. In 2004, they were spotted by two young French filmmakers who helped them put together their album and chronicled what happened. It took five years, but the record traitre 4 or very, very Strong became a global hit and saw the group leave Kinshasa's crumbling streets for a triumphant tour of Europe. This is not a case of rags to riches, rather of rags to moderate security. Amidst Congo's continuing problems, I visit Ricky, the band's leader and driving force, outside his house at the age of 60. It's the first he has ever owned. I chose it because it's on the corner and all my friends can visit, he says, sipping from a cold beer in the morning heat. The little stool from which he sold cigarettes in the past is still there, as is his motorized wheelchair, two battered motorbikes welded haphazardly together. I ask Ricki about recording the album in the zoo and whether from now on they will look for more affluent surroundings in which to make music. We're not going to start using studios, he replies. Outside it's better. The atmosphere, the fresh air, always the music of the street Their songs are educational, warning of the dangers of polio or encouraging people to vote. Each Sunday they play in a small, dusty bar in a run down part of town. Their sound is part blues, part Congolese rumba, with elements of fox funk and reggae thrown in. The disabled band members form an almost defiant line of wheelchairs at the front, with Ricky at the centre, scruffily chic with his trademark hat. Behind is the percussion and Roger, another remarkable character. He is a former Kinshata slang for street kid, whom they found, aged 11, a small boy playing a one stringed instrument called a setonge that he'd fashioned from an old powdered milk tin. Now Roger has much of the rock star about him, turned up collar and languid style. On stage, he is mesmeric, teasing guitar like solos from his strange little contraption. The crowd, many of whom are also disabled, whoop and holler as the band play. When they finish, we talk over beers about their upcoming tour, which will take them to, amongst other places, Britain. They see it as a challenge where they must deliver if they are not to slip into obscurity again. For all the laughter, they're serious and down to earth, taking nothing for granted. It's not hard to see why. Later, Ricky takes me to his old refuge, a former community hall, now a grubby, hot and crowded home to 57 disabled families. We meet a group of musicians, mostly disabled, whom Ricky has helped by buying them instruments. I watch as two men, their lower bodies shrivelled and broken, dance using their arms to spin and flip in time to the beat. Now Ricky plans to build a new disabled centre if he can raise the money. It is all part of the legacy he wants to leave, one that will empower others like him. But can one admittedly incredible tale of success against the odds really alter things in a country where the problems are so vast, I wonder. Ricki insists it can. Normally, handicapped people can't work here, he says. That must change, and with our music, it is changing a little. You're quite an idealist, I say, teasing him gently. Of course, he replies with a broad smile.
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Johnny Hogg on the streets of Kinshasa, bringing another edition to a close. I'll be here again on Saturday Morning with more from our own correspondents around the world. Do join us. Goodbye.