← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
March 19, 2011
00:28:18
Explosions and gunfire in Benghazi -- Kevin Connolly on the struggle for power in is...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC.
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It's from our own correspondent and it's
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introduced by Kate Ady today.
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Ceasefire in Libya. Reports from Benghazi this morning suggest Colonel Gaddafi's forces aren't finished yet. A city with 30 million people, eerily quiet. There's fear in Tokyo at the prospect of nuclear catastrophe. The Californian politicians who believe their jobs are so dangerous they need guns to stay safe. And the story of a snow leopard removed from her home in the mountains of Pakistan. All for her own good, apparently. What exactly is happening in eastern Libya this morning, a day after the government in Tripoli said it was observing a ceasefire in the fight against opponents of Colonel Gaddafi? This morning, there are reports of his troops attacking the rebel city of Benghazi. Explosions and gunfire have been heard. A fighter jets gone down in flames. Western and Arab nations, meanwhile, are said to be preparing their warplanes for action after receiving UN Security Council backing. Kevin Connolly, who is along the coast in Tobruk, says that amidst the uncertainty, one thing's clear. This is a part of the world well used to the brutality and uncertainties of warfare.
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The trouble with history is that whatever ends up happening comes to seem inevitable once it's happened. While it's still going on, it tends to feel a little more shapeless and a lot more difficult to pin down. The ribbon of road that runs along the northern coast of Africa provides plenty of lessons in humility for anyone who thinks they know how today's world will look to tomorrow's. The graveyards of the Second World War are sprinkled like petals fallen from a wreath along the desert highway. They hold tens of thousands of silent witnesses to the uncertainties of history and the unknowability of the future. The dead lie between the startling amethyst and azure shades of the sea and the gloomy vastness of the desert, architect of a world they never lived to see. Libya, the land where they fought, is living now again through violence whose outcome we cannot know. The leaders of Libya's uprising against the brutal rule of Muammar Gaddafi have set in train a sequence of events whose final outcome is hard to predict. A month ago, it felt like part of an orderly sequence, a chain reaction of exhaustion with the democratic deficit of the Arab world, which swept away the old autocracies of Tunisia and Egypt. The Libyan uprising had a kind of joyfulness to it, and ominously, it felt like it had a kind of inevitability, too. Protesters who'd never dared to speak their mind queued up to tell Us what they'd seen, or more often, what they'd heard other people had seen. Gaddafi had already killed himself or had gone mad, or had gone to Venezuela. His tank crews were manacled into their armored vehicles to force them to obey orders to attack the people. His bomber pilots were forced to fly without parachutes or ejector seats to force them to complete their missions. All you could know for sure through the fog of war was the passion of a people discovering freedom. Giving a voice to the voiceless is a humbling experience. The pace of the rebellion has slowed since then, and its course now seems more difficult. The rebels themselves still have the simplest of goals and the noblest of aspirations. They want to get rid of Muammar Gaddafi and enjoy the rights that Americans and Europeans take for granted. But the road ahead now seems littered with uncertainties. In our more pompous moments, we reporters like to tell ourselves that we are writing the first draft of history. And perhaps we are, although it does us good to note the colossal gulf between our hasty scribblings and the later accounts of the way things were. Libya's rebels are lightly armed civilians who'd prepared themselves only for a kind of triumphal progress along that coastal highway, culminating in an uprising in Tripoli which would signal the liberation of their country. History began to seem a bit less inevitable for them when Gaddafi's armed forces blocked their progress and began to drive them back along the road to freedom which they'd been following. The rebels tell us now that the regime soldiers are all mercenaries, and people who appear to support Qadhafi in shots on television are often the families of rebel fighters, forced to pose with pictures of the colonel as the price for having the bodies of their dead fighters returned to them. It is hard for the rebels to accept the alternative view that Qaddafi, for whatever reason, retains a degree of support, and that what started as a popular rising may settle into a civil war. The rebels hope now, of course, is that Western military intervention will restore momentum to their cause and destroy their enemy. They have to close their minds to the more awkward lessons of history, that surgical strikes are not always as clean and therapeutic as they sound, and that foreign military intervention doesn't always start when you want it to and doesn't always end when you want it to either. None of the rebels that I've met wanted a civil war, and none wants partition either, with Benghazi as the capital of an independent eastern Libya. But revolutions are unpredictable affairs. History, as always, can prove pretty much anything you want. Lots of people Compare the inspiring push for freedom across the Middle east, the Arab Spring, to the wave of uprisings that brought liberty and democracy to Eastern Europe in the early 1990s. But you can look back further in that region, too, to the darker precedents of the Hungarian rising and the Prague Spring. Brutality, depressingly does work, and it can work for a long time, too. That is not to say, of course, that it will work again here. The rebels of eastern Libya have already discovered that there is nothing inevitable about revolutions. And the Western powers may be about to deliver another reminder that it is easier to get into somebody else's conflict than to get back out of it again. Muammar Gaddafi is gambling that brutality and ruthlessness are the key to holding on to power. But of course, there's nothing inevitable about that either.
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Kevin Connolly in eastern Libya. Don't be discouraged. That's the message from the Japanese prime minister. Eight days after the earthquake and tsunami, which killed at least 7,000 of his people this morning, engineers working at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant say they're making progress in restoring restoring power to its crippled cooling systems, but they're still considering burying the reactors in concrete to avert a catastrophic radiation leak. Rupert Wingfield Hayes, who's been covering the destruction and the relief efforts in the north of the country, has now moved on to the capital. People there, he says, are typically stoical, but they're also frightened.
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Sitting here in Tokyo, it doesn't feel particularly scary. The sky is clear and blue, and from my hotel window the late winter sunshine glints off the snow capped perfection of Mount Fuji. This being Japan, no one is running around screaming and shouting. The streets are quiet and orderly. But life here is definitely not normal. The threat to Tokyo's 30 million people is invisible. Everyone is now asking themselves the same. When does the crisis unfolding at the Fukushima nuclear plant, 150 miles to the north? Cross that invisible line where you decide the risk of staying here is too high. For many with young children, that line has already been crossed. You can see them at Tokyo Station with push chairs, dashing to get on a bullet train to Osaka. And beneath the surface veneer of calm. Here there are signs of a society in deep shock and filled with anxiety. I've been coming to this city at least once a year for the last 18 or so, ever since I met a young Japanese woman and decided I wanted to marry her. Tokyo has always been a place of wonder and fascination. On a normal day, Tokyo can make any other city in the world feel grey and boring. The Streets Pulse with neon. 24 hours a day in Harajuku, you can stare in wonder at the young boys and girls dressed up as Japanese cartoon characters. The girls in frilly miniskirts, their faces painted white and their heads crowned with bright blond hair. At way past midnight, you can sip an ice cold beer and eat the best sushi in the world at a little place near Ginza Station. And yes, you really can see besuited salarymen fast asleep on the pavement after a heavy night of drinking with clients and missing the last train home. But today, this is a very changed city. It sounds like a cliche to say a place with 30 million people can feel eerily quiet and but it does. If I hadn't been here in normal times, I might have missed the small but significant changes. Fewer people are walking the streets. The traffic jams are gone. Face masks are now worn by almost everybody. The neon lights have been switched off and restaurants are now closing at 10, if they open at all. And behind the public facade, that outward face that Japanese people are trained to put on from childhood, there is fear. Inside their homes, people are glued to television, watching the events at Fukushima with growing dismay. What seemed to be a serious but manageable crisis a few days ago has grown and grown. But the understandable fear of what might happen at the Fukushima plant is overshadowing the real human tragedy unfolding further north along the devastated coastline. We've all now seen the extraordinary television pictures of the tsunami rolling in. They're like a scene from a far fetched Hollywood disaster movie. There is a voyeuristic compulsion to watch them over and over, and a danger of forgetting that the pictures are of real towns populated by real people, thousands of whom are now dead or missing. Japan is usually a very easy place to get around. You can hop on a bullet train in Tokyo and be 300 miles away in less than two hours. But now, just getting to the disaster zone is a gruelling 11 hour drive on tiny back roads through the mountains. When you get there, you enter another surreal world. In Miyagi Prefecture, we drove towards the coast through beautiful picture postcard countryside. Little valleys filled with rice fields, surrounded by mountains and bamboo forests. Nothing seemed out of place, no sign at all of damage from the massive earthquake. Even as we approached the little fishing port of Kesennuma, there was no hint of what we were about to find. Then, as we crested the last ridge before the coast, the world changed. In front of us lay a vast debris field that had once been the town. Everything was destroyed. Houses smashed to pieces, others still intact but lying on their roofs like some upturned tortoise. Cars crushed beyond recognition littered the landscape. As we drove down into the port, the scene became even more unreal. As I rounded a corner, I was confronted by a large 10,000 ton ship sitting perfectly upright in the middle of the road. On the day I was in Kesennuma, they brought only two people out of the destruction alive. All the rest were bodies like the tsunami that hit Southeast Asia six years ago. The division here is between those who escaped the wave and survived and those who didn't and died. For those who did survive, there is no end in sight to the suffering either. Yesterday in Tokyo, I met a group of young British teachers who'd just been evacuated from the disaster zone. They were visibly upset at leaving behind Japanese friends and students and irritated that we all seemed more concerned about the nuclear plant. Please tell the outside world that the people up in the north need our help. They said they don't have enough to eat. They are cold and in shock. They need help. It's an extraordinary thing to say about one of the richest countries in the world. But the scale of this disaster is so vast, even wealthy advanced Japan is struggling to cope.
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And that was Rupert Wingfield Hayes. Politicians in California are tabling legislation which would give them special dispensation to carry concealed firearms in order to protect themselves. This follows the shooting in Tucson, Arizona earlier this year in which a congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head at a constituency gathering. With gun violence now said to be claiming some hundred thousand American lives a year, David Willis has been taking a fresh look at the country's attitude towards firearms.
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You're in luck, said Ernie, the avuncular assistant at the guns and ammo store. Ever since that lady got shot, we've been selling out of these virtually as soon as we get them in stock. Retrieving a Glock 19 semi automatic pistol from a display case, he laid it on the counter. The same weapon that was used in both the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings in which a total of 45 people died. In order to own one, I would have to pass both a government background check and a handgun safety test. But not to worry. The former was by all accounts little more than a formality. The latter could have been tricky were it not for a handy booklet containing all the information you needed to pass the exam with flying colors. Californians aren't the only ones who've been arming themselves. For all the soul searching that followed the Arizona massacre. It's widely thought the best way of preventing such violence in the future lies with more guns, not less. Had just one of Gabrielle Gifford's constituents been armed, so the theory goes, the young man who opened fire at the Toussaint supermarket could have been stopped in his tracks. A gun in the hand is better than a cop on the phone, to borrow a phrase. And of the hundreds of gun bills currently being debated in states across America, it's thought that well over half would actually make it easier for people to carry firearms. With that in mind, California's politicians have decided they want in on the action. They've introduced a bill which would grant special dispensation to carry concealed weapons to a small but elite group themselves. Whilst ordinary folks are obliged to confine their gun use to their homes and businesses, those who represent them would be able to take theirs anywhere, secretly, of course, hidden from public view. One of the bill's sponsors, a senator called Lou Correa, clearly believes what happened in Arizona could happen here. Despite the fact that his constituency includes Disneyland, reputed to be the happiest place on earth, Mr. Correa says it's not unknown for members of the public to come into his office office screaming and shouting. And on a couple of occasions, constituents have even threatened to beat him up. Whatever the cause, Mr. Correa believes the politicians need protection from the people, regardless of the fact that some argue it really should be the other way around. What's unusual about the California bill is that Mr. Correa and the two other politicians who drafted it are all Democrats, members of a party which has traditionally favoured curbs on gun ownership. President Obama himself, of course a Democrat, also supported tighter gun laws. Although judging by a recent article in the Arizona Daily Star, it seems that he too may be softening his stance, describing most gun owners as highly responsible. The President maintained the best way to prevent a repeat of the Toussaint tragedy was to carry out better background checks. Sell as many guns as you like, he seemed to be saying. Just don't sell them to folks who mutter to themselves or have a tendency to howl at the moon. This fetish for firearms puzzles most outsiders and troubles more than a few. Yet the right to bear arms is so entrenched in the national psyche that even now, there are those who regard a shotgun or a revolver as a bulwark against the potentially acquisitive impulses of the federal government. An armed man is a citizen, so the theory goes, an unarmed man, a subject. Hence, if you strip him of his gun, you are by default depriving him of his right to defend himself. It's estimated that 45% of American households own at least one firearm. The question, of course, is where will it all end? Will the prospect of pistol packing lawmakers in California inspire their counterparts across the country to take up arms? And which profession will be the next to declare that they too need to be able to defend themselves in the workplace? Schoolteachers struggling to control delinquent pupils, perhaps doctors coping with recalcitrant patients. Comedians confronted by audiences that don't get the joke. Maybe instead of buying that Glock 19, I should put up a sign in the front garden which reads, whatever you're carrying, I've something of a higher calibre. And if that doesn't work, hire a bodyguard.
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David Willis in Los Angeles. On the streets of Israel today, you'll hear Hebrew everywhere. Yet not so long ago, it wasn't a spoken language, although it was still read by many. Now, though, it's a thriving tongue. New words are added each year, while some of those from ancient times are being adapted for use in the 21st century. Hannah Barnes has been to Israel to meet some of the people charged with ensuring that Hebrew is fit for use in the modern world.
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At the top of a steep, winding driveway in a hidden corner of the Hebrew University stands the Academy of the Hebrew Language. Despite its grand title, it's a small, modest building camouflaged by a circle of trees. The Academy sets the standards for the use of modern Hebrew and adds new words to its vocabulary. Inside its sand coloured brick walls, there are books everywhere, piled high from floor to ceiling. And then there are the pictures of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the man many credit with reviving the Hebrew language more than a hundred years ago. For nearly 2,000 years, people didn't speak Hebrew, at least not as a daily language. Jews would pray in Hebrew and synagogues and read Hebrew in religious texts, but there weren't any native Hebrew speakers. The first of them was Ben Yehuda's son, Itamar Benavi. You wouldn't envy him. He had a thoroughly miserable childhood, homeschooled, locked up by his parents and not allowed to play outside with other children, so that he wouldn't be exposed to any other languages. For a long time, people thought he'd be mute. It wasn't until he was three and a half that Itamar spoke his first Hebrew word. Part of the difficulty in bringing an old language back to life was that, well, life had changed the words that existed in the Bible, often described rather grand ideas like love, war, and peace. But that's no help if you're trying to get your shopping done. There were no words back then for ice cream or jelly or underwear, so Ben Yehuda and his friends simply made them up, using old Hebrew roots to hint at the new word's meaning. And that process is still happening today. In her small office inside the academy, I meet Karen Dubnov. Originally from Russia, Karen is Hebrew's greatest enthusiast. I fell in love with it, she tells me, smiling. She taught herself the language and describes her current job as her wildest fantasy. She answers the Hebrew hotline. The service provided by the Academy is very 21st century. The hotline now operates through a Web interface. People can ask any question they like, but they can also suggest new words. Ideas arrive every week, some more successful than others. We take all the letters seriously, kerin says. Not all the proposals are serious, though. She tells me about the word metzhev hev, except it's not really a word yet. It's been proposed by a proud mother whose daughter coined the word to describe a broken traffic light, one that's stuck on amber and flashing. In this case, the young girl takes the word for yellow, sahov and the word for blinking mehe hev, and puts them together to create something new. It's perfect slang, keren beams. I liked it very much, but I couldn't keep it. Why? I asked. As if stating the obvious, she smiles. Well, it's not really needed. The modern Hebrew language is growing all the time. Around 20 new words are officially added each year, but if you count technical vocabulary and jargon too, it can run into the hundreds. Approving them can be a lengthy process. A committee has to consider them, and it can take several years to reach a decision. Language is a sensitive issue in Israel. It's even discussed in Parliament, the knesset. Back in 2005, the then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon chastised Israelis for using the Arab English hybrid expression yallabay to say farewell to each other. You hear it everywhere in Israel. Instead, Sharon argued, they should be using what he referred to as the most beautiful word shalom. There are so many foreign loan words in Israel today that the academy faces an uphill battle. Why bother to memorize a new Hebrew term when you can get by perfectly well with the American slang of MTV presenters? Hebrew purists might well have been horrified by ruth, a lean 17 year old with piercings in her nose, ears and eyebrow, who I met appropriately on Jerusalem's Ben Yehuda street, named after the father of modern Hebrew. I was there testing a claim made by an academic that Israelis can't understand the Hebrew of the Bible because of the influence other languages have had on its modern day successor. I asked people to read and then translate a couple of biblical verses. Ruth's shorter but equally confident friend immediately turned herself into a human beatbox, making little rhythmic grunts while Ruth rapped the words Isaiah like you've never heard it before.
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Hannah Barnes the snow leopard is one of the world's most striking creatures. It lives in splendid isolation among the craggy mountain peaks of central Asia. But it's an endangered species. Its habitats whittle back a little more every year and poachers prize it for its beautiful fur. It's believed there are now fewer than 6,000 snow leopards in the wild. Mohammed Hanif has been following efforts being made to ensure the continuing survival of just one of these big cats.
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As the first snow of the season fell in Lalazar, a lush green valley in northern Pakistan, the zookeepers began to starve. Their only inmate, Shehzadi, a three year old snow leopard. A team of half a dozen men walked up a narrow mountain trail, carrying on their shoulders a small cage attached to long poles. They put a few dead chickens in the small cage, placed it next to a ha store in the leopard's enclosure and opened the door. The famous Ehzadi followed the smell of food and walked into the small cage. The hatch store behind her clanked shut. The men lifted the cage on their shoulders and started walking down to the main road where a truck waited. This would take her to a zoo in Abbottabad, a town in the plains some three hours drive away. It doesn't snow in Abbottabad and this would be Shehzadi's home for the winter months. The snow leopard was being taken away from Lalazar for exactly the period of time that it snows there. We journalists faced with such situations tend to shout out the word irony. I didn't see any irony here, only confinement, torture and plain old fashioned brutality. I had caught a glimpse of Ehzade one day as he took a siesta towards the end of summer last year. She was cajoled out of her little bunker by a bunch of noisy children. She was as beautiful as the snow peaked mountains in the distance. I am not much of an animal lover. The only opinion that I hold about them is that they be allowed to live well like animals. Shehzadi's enclosure was no more than 150ft long and 70ft wide. The big Cat stretched her body lazily. Ripples went through her black spotted fur. Her immense tail looked like a separate creature. Then this wild beast known for being shy and elusive started to behave like a domestic pet. She put her back to the iron bars and children, encouraged by the zookeeper, started to tickle it. The children ran along the cage and Ehzade ran with them like a dog playing catch in a park. The zookeeper told me that a snow leopard can run at a speed of 60 miles an hour. And here she was just indulging the children. Shehzadi also probably knew that whatever speed she ran at she would hit the wall after 150ft. Then, bored with this child play, she started to leap at the walls rattling them with her huge paws. For a few moment it wasn't just the enclosure but also the surrounding mountains that seemed to tremble with her wild rage. The word Shehzadi means princess and it's a common name for girls all over Pakistan. This particular Ehzadee was imported by the son of a powerful politician and was meant for his private zoo. The customs impounded her. The news was leaked to the media and in a rare case of law abiding the father refused to defend the his son's illegal hobby. The snow leopard was handed over to the wildlife department. They named her Shehzadi and decided to house her in the middle of a beautiful valley called Lalazar. The enclosure was constructed, a nominal ticket price was decided. A canteen sprung up. Plans were made for the possible expansion of the zoo. Anti littering signs were put up and slowly a small tourist economy was in place. These days lalazar is under 10ft of snow. In Abbottabad, where Shehzadi is spending her winter the temperature is 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Why must a snow leopard be kept away from snow? Because in Lalazar it would be almost impossible to feed her. The trail leading up to her enclosure is narrow and difficult. The wildlife department doesn't have the resources to take care of her in the winter. So the simple answer is Ehzade has to be taken away from snow for her own good. For a moment I wondered if this is a metaphor for Pakistan's current troubles. That we must be bombarded from the skies by American drones and attacked by our own militants in our own streets. All for our own good. But we are not snow leopards and Shehzadi's fate is no metaphor. If someone was to open the door of that cage, what would happen? If Ehzadi can really run as fast as they say she can. Within a couple of hours, she'd be up on those mountains where snow never melts. Animal lovers might worry that after a long time in captivity she would find it difficult to survive in the wild. I can't be sure, but I do know we are not the snow leopards in this story. Shahzadi is. She would know how to live in the snow.
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And with that from Mohammed Hanif in Karachi. We've reached the end of another edition. We'll be back next Saturday morning. Do join us. Goodbye.