← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
March 5, 2011
00:28:01
Dreams of a new Libya in the revolutionary city of Benghazi but, as Kevin Connolly's...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent.
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You can hear the version of the
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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 and get a sneak preview of the stories, you can sign up to our Twitter feed as well.
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But now, with the addition Broadcast on
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Radio 4, here's Kate Ady.
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Today they're still fearful in the city where the Libyan revolt began. The King of Saudi Arabia tries to head off the possibility of a people's uprising. Opponents of the President of Belarus come to court in what some describe as Soviet style show trials. Also, there's an embarrassing moment for our correspondent, inappropriately dressed on a hunting trip up the Amazon. There are reports of heavy fighting this morning in the town of Zawira, west of the Libyan capital Tripoli. It's still not clear if forces loyal to Colonel Gaddafi hold the upper hand or whether they'd been repulsed by anti government rebels. To the east of Tripoli, there's also been fighting in the oil port of Raslanouf. The opposition leader in the main rebel held city of Benghazi has urged the west to impose a no fly zone on Libya to prevent Qaddafi from launching air attacks on Libyans. Kevin Connolly has been hearing why people there hope Gaddafi's rule will soon be over.
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There are evenings in Benghazi when the darkness of the dust storms rolling north out of the desert gets to town before the night edging south towards the land from the wintry Mediterranean. Then the grey dusk thickens and slowly erases the detail of daytime from view. The advertising hoarding where a poster of Muammar Gaddafi has been torn down to reveal another, older poster of him underneath the faded elegance of the old Italian buildings in port. Just before darkness finally comes, some trick of the desert sky gives the sea an eerie phosphorescent glow, as though the light were rising up from within. It must have looked this way to generations of soldiers who slogged along this narrow coastal highway, skirting the vast and forbidding distances of the deserts of North Africa. The wind and the sand have long since rubbed out their tracks. Of course, the British and the Australians, along with the Romans and Phoenicians, Every foreign ruler left a mark. A ghost of Italian culture survives in the way instant coffee is proudly served with a crispy flourish of foamy milk as a cappuccino. And you know the British were here because they left behind their chunky, clunky, three pin electrical plugs and the practice of topiary and strange habit of clipping and reshaping bushes in public parks until they look a bit like something else. The rebel fighters of modern day Benghazi know the mark that they want to leave behind them. They want their children to have the freedom to choose their own leaders and then be able to criticise them without fearing the secret policeman's knock on the door or his truncheon in the kidneys. When I asked a group of young people how many knew of an immediate relative who'd been arrested for political offences, 80% put their hands up, including their lecturers, who told me they were surprised it wasn't more. Brothers, fathers, cousins, all disappeared, often for years, always without explanation, sometimes without ever coming back. As they told their stories, I sensed their lecturers tensing a little in their seats behind me. The students had been in the crowns, who were fired on with live ammunition as they protested at the military barracks in Benghazi in recent weeks, and who had somehow prevailed, creating the spark for a sustained rebellion against Muammar Gaddafi. Their teachers, though, were old enough to remember how a previous generation of student protesters had been dealt with here, in a city which has always prided itself on its spirit of independence. Gaddafi had the leaders hanged from the lamp post in the city centre and left the bodies dangling there. One teacher told me she hoped each generation was becoming less fearful the and the one which went before it. Her own elderly mother, she said, had wanted to be taken downtown to see the celebrations that marked the birth of free Benghazi, but had been breathless with terror the whole time she was there. She was filled with a kind of nameless dread that harm would somehow befall them just for being out on the streets. Maybe, we agreed autocracy was becoming less and less possible in the modern world. Dictatorship relies on the darkness of ignorance, and every text message, every email and every satellite news broadcast is a pinprick of light. I was encouraged, and then we spoke again on the phone the following day. Would I mind? The teacher asked, not using her name. It wasn't, she said, so much for herself. Her parents were anxious, but in Tripoli, Gaddafi's men were still watching and listening, waiting to pay the rebels back for their audacity when the world's attention wanders from the confusing stalemate into which Libya might well descend. This is a country where fingernails are routinely ripped off, teeth smashed, lives ruined, hearts broken, where anyone who breathes doubt or defiance simply disappears before their names can become known. It is a powerful tool of dictatorship that hardly anyone has ever heard of anyone else. There is no scope for heroic gestures of defiance, just the instant anonymity of disappearance and death. So I won't be using her name. Gaddafi's flair for eccentric buffoonery sometimes masked the darkness of his power, and his oil reserves blunted the inclination of the free world to ask difficult questions. Don't be distracted by those newspaper photo galleries that show him morphing from white suited, droopy, moustached disco king to russet, robed and hooded eyed desert mystic. Or by those amusing stories about how he once banned football because it seemed inequitable that 50,000 people had to stand and watch while only 22 people got to play with the ball. Remember? Instead, my teacher, annoyed with herself and embarrassed because she can't shake off the habit of fear. It's taken all her life to learn and think about the cruelty and the arrogance and the violence it takes to reduce a whole country to that state. For 41 years, we don't know if the rebels of Benghazi will ever be able to fight the government forces that still protect Muammar Gaddafi, or what will happen to them if they do. But this extraordinary Arab Spring has brought the promise of freedom, and the people of eastern Libya believe if they seize the moment, they will still be enjoying that freedom when the desert winds and sands have once again erased the footsteps of fighting men.
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That was Kevin Connolly. The price of oil soared to its highest level since September 2008 this week, amid reports of fighting close to oil installations in Libya. Investors are also concerned about instability in other oil producing nations like Yemen, Algeria and Oman, and they wonder what will happen if protests take hold in the biggest oil producer of all, Saudi Arabia. Today it's reported extra troops are being drafted into sensitive areas. Frank Gardner, who's reported on the kingdom for many years, says the authorities are taking precautions.
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You see that palace over there? Said the man in the driver's seat beside me. I strained my eyes to peer through the dusky haze. Light falls quickly in Riadh, and all I could see were high walls and a sentry box. Well, behind those walls, said my sidey driver, is the palace of one of our richest princes. Look at it, he urged. It has all the lights on and he's not even there. He's on holiday in Spain now. Don't worry, I haven't suddenly returned to the city where I got shot seven years ago. This was 2003, and Saudi Arabia had yet to experience the wave of terrorism that was to convulse it for Several years. But there were tensions then beneath the surface, and there are tensions now in what is arguably the most important Arab nation, the world's biggest oil producer and home to the holiest shrines in Islam. The question many are asking is whether these could lead to dramatic regime change, as has happened in Tunisia and Egypt. Encouraged by events there would be, Saudi reformers have planned a protest for later this month. So is there really a chance we could see the mighty house of Al Saud toppled by some popular revolution? Saudi Arabia is very different from North Africa's secular post colonial republics. For a start, it's a devout, conservative country where large portions of the population are deeply suspicious of change, or indeed of any outside influences. The kingdom is held together by a delicate balancing act between King Abdullah, the princes, the religious establishment, and the merchants. The vast Al Saud family rule the country. With a nod from the religious clerics, the king holds the title custodian of the two holy shrines, that's Mecca and Medina. And in return, the clerics are given considerable sway in the country's affairs. Upsetting this balance carries the risk of what devout Saudis call fitnawadalala, roughly translated as discord and deviation, something they fear above all else. Critics often describe Arab rulers as monolithic dinosaurs, fiercely resistant to change. But the truth is that in the Gulf, the rulers can actually be the ones subtly trying to introduce reforms, sometimes coming up against strong resistance from the religious establishment. Saudi Arabia's King Faisal incurred its wrath in the 1960s with when he introduced television and education for women. Today, King Abdullah, although well into his 80s, has also been a relative reformer. He's been making princes pay their phone bills and pushing for women to play a bigger role in the economy and in politics. So just what are the tensions in this vast, often misunderstood country? There are several I've mentioned. The religious clerics who follow the strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. But pulling the country in the opposite direction are many young, well educated Saudis who would like to see it more in tune with the rest of the world. First and foremost, they want more job opportunities for the half million plus Saudis pouring out of schools and universities each year. They would like to seek government and the judiciary more transparent and more accountable, turning the absolute monarchy into a constitutional one. And they'd like a genuinely free press. Some would like to see an end to the monopoly on power of a small, unelected clique who are all from the same family. The age gap is becoming a real factor in Saudi Arabia. The average age there is 19 years. Yet the king, the crown prince and interior minister are all in their 80s, and the latter, Prince Naif, has been in the same job for an incredible 41 years. Then there is the question of the Shiites, a minority who some religious hardliners even consider to be heretics. They've been discriminated against in the past, and the rulers are nervous about them because they inhabit the east of the country, around the oil industry opposite the coast of Iran. But is any of this enough to spark a people's revolution that overthrows the rulers? Most Saudis think it unlikely. The Al Sauds, one newspaper editor told me, are the glue that holds this country together. Ultimately, a lot comes down to money. With oil at well over $100 a barrel, the government and the princes are flush with cash. And yet there are parts of the country where people are really quite poor. I've seen graffiti covered back streets in Riyadh and Jeddah where litter spills out of rusting dustbins onto the sand. Hence the envy when some people go past a prince's palace. King Abdullah has now tried to head off any unrest by announcing £22 billion worth of benefits and subsidies for poor Assadis. And this has had a calming effect. But on social networking sites like Twitter, I've noticed that Saudis are starting to question the unwritten contract between ruler and ruled. Why do we have to choose between comfort and freedom? Why, they ask, can we not have both?
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Frank Gardner the president of Belarus is being accused of carrying out a Soviet style purge of critics who've been protesting against him. Alexander Lukashenko was re elected with 80% of the vote, according to official results during elections in December. Five of the candidates who stood against him are now among 40 people being taken to court. The president's critics have denounced the proceedings as Soviet style show trials. David Stern was in court watching as one of the first of those accused came before a judge.
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Vasily Parfinkov hardly looked like a revolutionary. With his light brown buzzcut and slightly roundish face, he bore a stronger resemblance to Wayne Rooney, the Manchester United footballer, than to Leon Trotsky. In fact, the Wayne Rooney comparison is misleading as well. Mr. Parfinkov was an entirely unassuming character. Dressed in a nondescript blue winter coat and no name Jeans. The 27 year old unemployed construction worker and former convict was the kind of person you probably wouldn't notice in a crowd, or if you did, you wouldn't remember him for long afterwards. But the Belarus security forces, which are still called the KGB, remembered Mr. Parfinkov very well. They had captured him on videotape outside Minsk's main government building on the night of December 19, after polls had closed in the country's presidential elections and thousands massed on the Capitol's central square, claiming President Lukashenko had stolen the vote. Mr. Parfinkov was being tried under Article 293 of the Belarusian Criminal Code, participating in mass disorders or, in layman's terms, taking part in a riot. The crime carries a sentence of between three and eight years in jail. He was accused of trying to storm the main government building, shattering its glass doors and, in general, posing a threat to the public. Though it was not part of his indictment, officials also said that the opposition had planned to stage a coup d'. Etat. When the time came to say whether he accepted the charges, Mr. Parfinkov said partially. He admitted that he had taken part in the demonstrations and ran to the front of the crowd when he heard the glass shattering. But he did not intend to storm the government building. So there we were, watching the video in the third floor courtroom, with gray green cinderblock walls and potted plants on the windowsill. To alleviate an otherwise oppressive institutional atmosphere, the video played on a laptop computer next to the judges stand. Mr. Parfinkov gazed at it intently from his position in a cage in the center of the courtroom. Defendants and trials in former Soviet Union countries are traditionally caged. The images were difficult to discern on the laptop's small screen, but the video seemed to show a person looking like Mr. Parfinkov, his face disfigured with rage as he shouted and kicked wooden barriers that had been placed inside the entrance to the government building. I used the ample time allotted to showing the video to examine the trial's main players. Mr. Parfinkov sat despondently in his cage, occasionally holding his crew cut head in his hands. Judge Olga Komar was hardly the image of strict and impersonal justice. She appeared almost girlish with her blond bob haircut, and she smiled occasionally. The young prosecutor, in his blue military uniform and his nervous presentation, was looked like a student in a high school play about a trial. Only Mr. Parfinkov's defense lawyer, in his rumpled brown suit and air of quiet outrage, looked the part. During a break, I asked Ales Bialiatsky, chairman of the Belarus human rights organization Viasna, what he thought so far. Procedurally, they're doing everything by the book, he said. But I am sure that the punishment will be decided not by this judge but by the presidential administration. At 5:30 we were called back to the courtroom for the decision. Judge Komar agreed with the prosecution that Mr. Parfinkov was guilty as charged. He was a dangerous individual, she said, and was sentenced to four years in a maximum security prison. What's more, he should pay some 3,000 pounds for breaking the government building's glass doors. Mr. Parfinkov's lawyer said that he would appeal the ruling. Seeing the judge hand down the sentence, I wondered whether the rest of the opposition defendants could expect similar punishment at some point. Five presidential candidates will be tried. Three of them are being held in jail. The charges they face for organizing mass disturbances carry a jail sentence of up to 15 years. Then judge Komar instructed the spectators to vacate the courtroom and we orderly filed out, leaving Mr. Parfinkov shoulders slumped in his cage.
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David Stern in Minsk the Indian authorities are keen to consign the rickshaw to history. They're not so bothered about the cycle powered version. It's the one dragged along by an often old and emaciated puller which worries them, creates the wrong impression in the new go ahead, booming India. Already they're illegal in much of the country, but they remain a feature on the streets of Calcutta or Kolkata, at least for the time being. Judy Swallow explains that while the hand rickshaw, as it's known, may soon head off into history, not everyone will be pleased to see it go.
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The gentle tinkling of its traditional bell sounds delightful amidst the cacophony of Kolkata traffic, with its ever increasing number of cars, taxis, lorries and motorbikes all seeming to compete to blare their horns loudest and longest. But turn around and the sight that greets you is far from delightful. A skinny, often elderly, usually barefoot man pulling a hand rickshaw, a shafted cart with a high seat atop two giant wooden wheels. It's not the image the new India wants the world to see, the one portrayed in the film City of Joy, the made in the slums of what was then Calcutta in 1991. Recently, Bollywood filmmakers have been boasting at international festivals that their country has well and truly shed that portrait of Third World squalor. But the central character of the film was a hand rickshaw puller, one of the city's fleet of tens of thousands of human horses, as they were called. They're banned worldwide, including in the rest of India. And yet 20 years on, there's still as many as 20,000 of them 6,000 licensed, the rest illegal but officially ignored in exchange for the odd bribe. Still pounding the treacherous streets of what is now Kolkata Lachman Rana is one of them. His is a typical story. He's around 50 years old, he thinks, but looks a good decade older. Lachman came here in 1983 from a town on the border of Bihar, India's poorest state. He and his young wife and child couldn't survive there. He couldn't even earn 50 pence a day. So he followed the path of so many of his fellow Biharians and came here. Not that he's a lot better off now. Like all the pullers, Lachman rents his rickshaw from an owner. Rich men you never get to meet. Rent has just gone up from 30 to 50 rupees a day, around 70 pence. But Lachman splits that with another puller. So he pays 25. And on most days a earns a hundred rupees, about one pound fifty. Somehow from that he told me, he manages to send home about a thousand rupees a month. It leaves him little to live on. Breakfast that day was a handful of the local cheap, filling snack. Puffed rice and a cup of chai cost five rupees. But he's one of the luckier ones. Many sleep on the streets beside their rickshaws, burning rubbish to keep warm. Lachman has a mat and a space on the floor of a shared room. And he has a pair of shoes. Despite these comforts, Lashman admits he's finding the work harder and harder as he gets older. When I first came here, he said I was young and fit and could run all day. Now I feel sick and weak a lot of the time. But he can't stop yet. In the early days, all the spare rupees were put aside for his first daughter's dowry. And now he's saving for the second.
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What a life.
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And yet, when the West Bengal government tried to ban rickshaw pullers five years ago, Lashman joined the strike against it and the government caved in. It didn't look good for a government of the left. West Bengal has the longest serving elected communist government in the world to be seen to be putting the poor out of work. And they didn't have an alternative plan. The pullers union? Yep, they have one. And it's quite powerful. Said they'd support the ban if the government produced a rehabilitation program for the rickshaw pullers. No plan, no ban. But that might soon change. West Bengal is due to go to the polls in May and all predictions are the communist government will lose power. I asked Lachman what he'd do then if the new government did actually bring in the long promised Ban and put him out of work. He rubbed the rough side of the building next to him. I'd have to do this, he said. Mortar walls on a building site. But why? I asked him. Don't you do that now? Surely working on a building site plastering will be easier than pulling a rickshaw. Oh no, he said. On building site you must work eight hours all at once. Never stop. Now when passenger come I work but no passenger. Then I rest. In fact, Lashman may not have to worry just yet about losing his job whoever wins the election, because there is another reason these hand rickshaws are still here. After the May poles will come the June monsoon. Nowhere do these torrential annual rains hit harder than in West Bengal. The water runs so deep on the streets. The yellow Ambassador taxis and the three wheeled motorised rickshaws don't venture out. Private cars are moved to higher, safer ground. Even the cycle rickshaw struggle. Only the handrickshaws with their high seats on giant wheels can get through. Ironically, it's Kolkata's rich who've lobbied hard to keep this apparently shameful legacy of the past. As for Lachman, during the monsoon he may have to wade through waist high water so that his well heeled passengers can keep their smart suits and saris dry, but he can put up his prices tenfold and put away quite a bit more for his daughter's dowry.
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Judy Swallow we were saying on the programme the other day that one of the obvious delights of life as a correspondent is the chance to encounter very different cultures from your own. A large part of the job is the business of trying to figure out their rhythms, codes and customs. But of course, no matter how hard you try, it's easy to strike the wrong note. But when Justin Rolatt went to meet the Ahwah people deep in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil in the he was certainly eager to please.
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The hunting expedition was arranged for early afternoon. I hadn't packed very well for this trip, so I was wearing my heavy hiking boots, a pair of jeans and a flower patterned short sleeved shirt. Not great jungle wear, I know, but the best I had to hand the village was just a couple of minutes stroll from where we had slung our hammocks, and even that short walk was enough to work up a heavy sweat. But it was only once I'd entered the village that I realized just how overdressed I was. We were filming with an Amazonian tribe called the awa. We were here to show how the global demand for Brazil's resources, in particular from China is driving deforestation. Until very recently, the AWA people were completely isolated. Indeed, some of the villagers here were contacted for the first time just 12 years ago and. And yet now their land is the most degraded of any indigenous tribe in the Amazon. The AWA are nomadic hunter gatherers and we wanted to film a hunt to illustrate how, as the loggers and farmers encroach on their land, it is increasingly difficult for them to live their traditional lifestyle. Indeed, they only live in a village because game is now so scarce. During the day we'd spent with them, the AWA had worn ragged T shirts and shorts or skirts. But walking into the village, it became abundantly clear that when it comes to hunting, some traditions remain strong. The hour hunters were completely naked, except for a piece of string tied to the end of their penises, which was decorated with bright bird feathers. They looked at me in my sweaty shirt and jeans and laughed. One motioned towards my groin and gestured as if he were tying a knot. The others laughed even harder. Clearly they thought I should dress more appropriately. I looked over at the director, Steve. He had a mischievous grin on his face. It was clear he thought I should too. The whole idea of this program is that you get involved, he reminded me with a laugh. Now, I appreciate that it is the director's job to make the most compelling film he can. But full nudity was, I thought, going a bit far. After all, a reporter must keep his dignity. I'm not wearing one of those and that's the end of it, I said, and turned perhaps a trifle petulantly and stomped off into the forest behind one of the hunters. To be fair, Steve seemed resigned to my decision. We filmed a wonderful sequence of the hour hunters and their families setting up a little camp in the forest. They built a small fire and then roasted a tortoise and a porcupine they'd caught on it. The hunters told me how the loggers were driving the animals out of the forest and explained that they target the same trees that the community relies on for fruits and berries. This is our land and if they cut our trees, we cannot survive, they told me, beating their chests in emphasis. After a couple of hours, Steve said we'd got enough and told David, the cameraman, to stop filming. We then began the trek back to the village. By the time we reached the little river that runs through the AWA territory, we were all hunters and BBC crew alike. Drenched with sweat, the hunters indicated that they were about to take a dip. Now there's nothing I love more than swimming in the open air and I was hot and uncomfortable and minded to join our hosts. I checked. The coast was clear. David wasn't even carrying the video camera and Steve was nowhere to be seen. I quickly stripped off and dived in too. The hour seemed delighted that at last I was surrendering to the spirit of the hunt. Then I noticed one of the young hunters on the bank brandishing a piece of string. I guessed what was coming next. He dived into the water beside me, string in hand. The other hunters were doubled up with glee. I had a choice. Fight him off or surrender to the joke. I tried rather ineffectually to push him away, but he was insistent. They'd invited us into their village and let us film, I reasoned, and they clearly thought the young man's antics were hilarious. What's more, string ears, the hours traditional hunting wear. As the man dressed me, I looked over to the riverbank. Steve had, as if by magic, materialised and David was pointing the stills camera he carries with him at me. I remembered it also shoots video. You won't use that in the film, will you? I asked plaintively from the water. Don't worry, said Steve with a smirk. It's a very wide shot. You look very small in frame. He and David collapsed with laughter. So much for the dignity of the reporter.
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What we have to put up with, Justin Roll out there, belittled up the Amazon and bringing this edition to a close. I'll be here with more from our own correspondence on Thursday and Saturday of next week. I hope you'll join us then. Goodbye.