← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
May 7, 2011
00:27:35
Weeks of violent confrontation in Uganda: Will Ross is in Kampala where lawyers are to...
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Kate Adie
Hi there.
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Narrator/Presenter
You're about to hear from our own correspondent, a download from the BBC. We make editions of the programme for
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Kate Adie
both the BBC World Service and Radio 4.
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Narrator/Presenter
And this is the latest Radio 4 broadcast. As ever, it's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Abbottabad, Pakistan, now forever linked with the killing of Osama Bin Laden, but once a peaceful spot of fishing and family holidays. Also today there are words of advice for an African president in the country where walking, it seems, has become a crime. We come face to face with an unwelcome visitor in the blue waters of the Caribbean and find a wild pig keeps us company as we wait and wait for the night bus to Bolivia. Relations between Pakistan and the United States are under considerable strain this weekend. Five days after U.S. special forces killed Osama bin Laden, demonstrations were held after Friday prayers in Pakistan yesterday, denouncing the COVID American operation as an attack on the country's sovereignty. Earlier, a Foreign Ministry official in Islamabad had dismissed as absolutely wrong speculation that the Pakistani authorities had been protecting Osama Bin Laden in his hideaway in Abbottabad. Ahmisha Hussain has been to the town to find out what people living there think.
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Ahmisha Hussain
My first sight of the house that had been Osama bin Laden's final home came after we drove down a narrow dirt road which winding through a neighbourhood of newly built and relatively affluent homes. As the road cleared into an open ploughed field with just a few houses dotted around, there was no mistaking that we had reached our destination. The satellite vans were back to back and crowds had gathered around the perimeter walls of the compound and in front of the imposing green gates. I stood in front of the building and tried to imagine if there was anything that would have made it stand out to me if I had passed by before Bin Laden made notorious. The walls were slightly higher than those of the neighbours and there were a few lines of nasty looking barbed wire at the top. The grounds were also more substantial than the houses nearby. Clearly this establishment belonged to someone affluent enough to dedicate a large proportion of their land to a garden. Among the crowds gathered outside was a group of young women who said they came past here every day for their evening walk. What did they think of the news that it was home to America's most wanted man? I just don't believe it, said one. Osama bin Laden was just too important a man to be living here in Abbottabad. Didn't they think there was something odd about this fortress like home? I wondered. No, said another. With all the bomb blasts in this country, plenty of people live behind walls like this. On the night of the American raid, they told me the sound of the helicopters was heard for miles then. Many assumed it was some kind of nighttime Pakistan army exercise. But then the firing began. Some told us they'd seen burning debris on the ground. But by the time the area around the compound was open to us, it had been well cleared. There was no sign of life inside and a heavy police presence at the gates. As the sun set in the valley and we headed back to our hotel, I passed the main entrance of a very different Abbottabad establishment, one whose name I have known all my life. A Burn hall was my father's school from the early 1950s when he came here to be educated by Christian missionaries. It still exists today, although it's now run by the army and educates girls as well as boys. Stories about Burnhall and the charismatic, if slightly forbidding Catholic fathers who taught there were a feature of my own childhood, especially on our annual fishing expeditions to the north of Pakistan, which when we would invariably pass through Abbottabad. This was where we stocked up on essentials, packing a few more supplies before we began the ascent into the mountains and then into the valley that was our regular summer haunt. Abbottabad always struck me as a very un Pakistani sounding name until I grew old enough to realize it was actually named for a certain James Abbott, a British officer who became a legend in this region in the 1840s and 50s and was knighted for his efforts to bring it firmly of the Raj. Curiously, although many pre independence British sounding names were changed over the years, this one remained a reminder of the colonial past. I'm sure few of Abbottabad's current residents know much about General Abbott though, and in any event it's now Osama Bin Laden who has put their town on the map. Close links to the Pakistan army are very evident here, from the roadside tank that alerts you to the nearby military academy, to the monument that proudly recreates and pays homage to one of the country's nuclear missiles. In the shadow of this giant weapon shaped sculpture, I encountered more disbelief about the events here. The Americans must prove to us that Bin Laden was here, said one man, proprietor of a small grocery store that charmingly labeled itself a tuck shop. His friend agreed. If they can really come here, catch him and take him away all in the space of half an hour, surely they can show us the body. But those doubts don't mean that people here have any great sympathy for Osama Bin Laden. Almost a decade after the September 11 attacks, many Pakistanis feel that they've paid a high price for their country's alliance with the United States, both in the security situation and in the free fall of their economy. Today, I cannot pack my own three children into the back of a car and drive into the mountains of northern Pakistan, as my parents did so freely with me. But I'm looking forward to the day when I can once again make that journey when we pass through Abbottabad. I'll have to tell the children, though, that it now has a place in history as well as one in the story of our family.
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Narrator/Presenter
And that was Michel Hussein. The center of one of the noisiest cities on earth fell silent for a while on Thursday. The man whose soldiers killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan came to ground zero in New York. He was there to pay tribute to the nearly 3,000 people who died in Al Qaeda's assault on the city on September 11, 2001. A huge crowd looked on as the president laid a wreath before talking privately to relatives of the victims and emergency workers. The presidential visit to downtown Manhattan came just a few days after our correspondent Paul Adams took his two sons to the spot where the Twin Towers had stood before their destruction on 9 11.
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Paul Adams
While American special forces in Afghanistan were putting the final top secret touches to their preparations for a raid that would carry them deep into Pakistan, I was, as chance would have it, in the midst of explaining the horror of 911 to my two young sons. We were at ground zero in New York, where for many it all began on that pristine September morning ten years ago. The site is a frenzy of construction, but it's not yet the new that people come to ponder. It's still the destruction of the old, the graceful Twin Towers brought down in a cataclysmic roaring cascade no one will ever forget. At the nearby visitor center set up as a tribute to the towers and and the victims, my sons watched the videos and examined the exhibits with uncharacteristic solemnity. At the end, they sat down to write something on the slips of paper offered for comments. Both chose a single word. William, his imaginative 12 year old, mind racing, wondered why. Felix, three years younger and more perplexed, asked simply how? Back home on Sunday, around the time that the rotor blades of American Black Hawk helicopters began to turn at a base somewhere in Afghanistan, the boys wanted to know more. With some trepidation on their behalf, but also mine, I let them watch the moments when the towers came down. The images are terrifying enough, but the howls of disbelief and fear emanating from the mouths of unseen onlookers are equally disturbing. Somehow it was a sound I'd allowed myself to forget. A few hours later, I was listening to different voices on my television. Whooping, cheering, bellowing voices from the streets outside the White House, from Ground Zero and a baseball game in Philadelphia. The sound of a nation wildly celebrating, for sure, but also of people collectively releasing a decade of pent up anger and bitterness against a man who wounded them so grievously and then seemed to vanish into thin air. The chants of usa usa and the pumping fists felt at times like mindless jingoism. But this was a moment of national catharsis, and it was an undeniably powerful spectacle amid the sense of euphoria generated by the news from Abbottabad, a name the satirist John Stewart said was just what a native New Yorker would call a town in Pakistan. Here, Abbottabad, there were plenty of voices urging caution. A soldier interviewed on the radio summed it up with the kind of simple eloquence Americans do so well. Yeah, we got him, he said. But we still got to go back and get someone else. That sense of a mission, apparently without end, is still a nagging one, even as the president prepares in the next couple of months to lay out the path towards an American withdrawal from Afghanistan. The death of bin laden will help Mr. Obama to make the case that a significant part of America's work is done. The man who masterminded the 911 attacks has gone to an anonymous watery grave with a bullet in his brain, and Afghanistan is no longer much of a haven for Al Qaeda. There's plenty of other business, to be sure, but the reason America went there in the first place is all but gone. The havens are elsewhere, and the war on terror has other fronts abroad and here at home. As they debated the significance of this week's momentous news, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wondered if it really made sense to be spending billions of dollars in Afghanistan when Yemen and perhaps Pakistan seem to pose more of a threat. But for all the worries, it's undoubtedly the case that America is feeling good about itself. The country has done what it promised to do. That it may along the way have involved waterboarding, rendition and black sites is a question that some are already asking. But I suspect that a majority of Americans would argue now that finally getting America's most wanted man was well worth the price of a little moral turpitude. And so, in a way, the 21st century's first decade is over, bookended by two defining events in the struggle we came to call the war on terror this week began with an uninhibited outpouring of very real emotion and ended with the President, head bowed, laying a wreath at the place where it all started. It feels strange to have chosen this moment to try and explain it all to my boys. But they need to know what happened, why it remains so important and why perhaps it's not over.
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Narrator/Presenter
Paul Adams. There have been weeks of violent confrontation between police and protesters in Uganda and the president, Yoweri Museveni, appears to be concerned. Perhaps recent events in the Arab world further north are playing on his mind. His government has banned demonstrations and has been arresting opposition leaders. The principal one, Dr. Kisa Besige, has been receiving medical treatment in neighbouring Kenya after being attacked by police. But Will Ross, who's in Kampala, says none of this is deterring a protest movement which has shown some novel ways of expressing dissatisfaction with the president and his attempts to stifle dissent.
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Kampala's largest bookstore is impressive, just next to the motivational publications which tell you how to think like a millionaire even if you're broken. There's a Ugandan section. State of Blood is sadly not a novel. It's the inside story of IDI Amin. The Dungeons of Nakasero is another tough read. I was looking for a copy of the book. What is Africa's problem? In it, the author says back in 1986, the problem of Africa in general and Uganda in particular is not the people, but leaders who want to overstay in power. And who wrote it? The current president, Yoweri Museveni, who's now been in the job for 25 years. The government will not admit it, but all's not well in Uganda right now. Food and fuel prices have gone through the roof. And seizing an opportunity to hurt the government, the opposition called walk to work protests a cunning way of getting round the ban on demonstrations. Yes, President Museveni has seen enough evidence of their impact in the Arab world. But when politicians started strolling to work, they were arrested. Walking, it seemed, had become a crime. Each time the main opposition politician, Dr. Khizr Bessige, resisted arrest, there were ever more violent clashes. Ugandans watched the evening news and were horrified. The sight of plain clothes policemen smashing the politicians car windows and spraying him with chemicals before dumping him on the back of a truck was the tipping point. Angered by what people condemned as police brutality, riots erupted. Out came the army and the tear gas and the bullets. The service at Kampala's All Saints Cathedral started with an unusual announcement. We'll be praying for the president and we'll also be praying for Dr. Bessige, said the vicar, Diana Casiga. The president and opposition leader used to be allies but haven't spoken to each other in more than 10 years during the 1980s Bush war that saw Yoweri Museveni shoot his way into power. Kieser Bessige was his personal doctor, but after serious disagreements, they've since stood against each other in successive disputed elections. The white robed Diana Casiga knows a thing or two about reconciliation. Having spent years trying to heal wounds across the color divide in South Africa under apartheid, she told me now was the time for talking, not fighting. I grew up in kampala in the 1970s. I know what it's like to live under Idi Amin, to have roadblocks, to hear gunshots, she said. For me as a child, those were our deepest nightmares. We don't want to go there sharing this view. Different religious leaders popped up on television calling for dialogue. The president's response? He told them to keep their noses out and stick to their religious work. Do you see me baptizing people? He asked. Outside the gates of Makerere University, there was a bizarre sight. A mosquito net under a tree, a mattress on the ground and a jacket and tie swinging on a coat hanger. There was a sign hunger Strike. End police brutality Now. The one man protest had only been going a couple of days when the young student collapsed and was taken to hospital to recover. At the high court, a bigger show of dismay, Uganda's lawyers had agreed to go on strike. In their black gowns, they thronged the court grounds to hand over a petition to the chief justice. We are mourning the death of the rule of law in Uganda, the Law Society president Bruce Cereri told me. A lot of lawyers did not join in, perhaps fearing the possibility of tear gas. The lawyers like money too much. It won't last long, a Ugandan journalist said with a smile. Whilst most Ugandans are disgusted by the way police have handled protests, the government has appeared out of touch, stubbornly defending the use of force. President Museveni used to be seen as very much in touch with the people, and almost everyone agrees he did a fantastic job for the country for part of his time in office. But now, with increased reliance on the military, the signs are not good. In a Kampala restaurant, I met George Kanyahamba. He was a minister and attorney general when President Museveni came to Power in 1986. He retired from life as a Supreme Court judge last year and is extremely worried about where Uganda is headed. He suggested the very issues of injustice that led to Yoweri Museveni taking up arms all those years ago were coming back. I asked him to compare the Museveni he knew then and the man now. They are two different people. Some Ugandans have said if the uwari Museveni of 1986 were to meet the Museveni of today, they would fight on sight. They would shoot each other.
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Will Ross in Kampala the Cayman Islands in the British West Indies offer some of the best scuba diving in the Caribbean. These three flat islands have no rivers to carry silt or pollution into the sea, so the deep offshore waters around the islands are among the clearest in the world. Tim Ecot knows the coral reefs here well, but tells us that on his most recent visit he was startled to come face to face with an unwelcome underwater visitor.
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Kate Adie
Just off the north shore of Little Cayman, I sink into the blue abyss. I'm descending the vertical coral wall at Bloody Bay Marine Park. Straight ahead and straight down there is nothing but blue a dizzying empty space where sunlight streams down and down into darker places well beyond my reach. But up close, the wall of coral is covered in giant barrel sponges as tall as a man, bright purple vase sponges, green and red corals and creatures that creep, crawl, and swim within. And among them I spot a seahorse clinging to a whip coral by its tail, a spider crab with legs almost three feet wide, and a baby hawksbill turtle rocketing to the surface for a breath of air. And there, spiraling up from the depths, come three graceful Caribbean reef sharks, curious and skittish. Suddenly I notice Peter Hillenbrand, my diving buddy, gesticulating angrily. He points with one hand and pulls the trigger on an imaginary gun. It's not the sharks he's angry at, but a brightly colored fish covered in feathery spines. I recognize it immediately as a lionfish, distinctive with its tracery of red brown stripes and the high venomous spikes all along its back and protruding from its pectoral fins, too. I've seen thousands of these fish in the Indian and Pacific oceans, but they shouldn't be here in the Caribbean. These fish are like Godzilla, peter tells me on the boat after we surface. Two or three years ago, we'd see the odd one, but now on every dive, they're there. I've been diving these reefs for over 30 years, and I'm worried that these fish are taking over. On Little Cayman, I visit the Central Caribbean Marine Institute, where scientists are studying the invasive population of lionfish, more properly known as Pterois volitans. Morgan Edwards, a postgraduate researcher at the Institute, invites me to watch her dissecting them. Even in death, they are beautiful, with a maze of dark red stripes all over their head and body, protective spines covered in a web of fine skin and delicate, frilly tassels of skin hanging from their mouths. After measuring its length, weight and other details, Morgan removes the stomach from each fish and opens it to find out what they've been eating. Shrimps, baby grouper, damselfish and crabs. Their stomach can expand up to 30 times its volume, Morgan explains, and they can swallow any other fish up to two thirds their own body length. But they seem to have no natural predators. Here in the Caribbean, the facts about lionfish are frightening. A female can produce 30,000 eggs every four days. The eggs are unpalatable to other fish. And lionfish are growing larger than they do in their native waters, up to 18 inches long. And they're stealthy ambush predators. No one knows how lionfish got into the Caribbean. One theory says they escaped from a Florida aquarium during a hurricane about 10 years ago. Others believe that tropical fish keepers released their pets into the sea when they grew too large to keep at home. It doesn't really matter how they got here, but since 1992, they've spread from Florida up the east coast of the United States, as far north as Long island in New York. About six years ago, they crossed the western Atlantic to Bermuda and then drifted south to Bahamas, Jamaica and Cuba. In 2008, the first lionfish was spotted at Bloody Bay on Little Cayman. One year later, there were hundreds, and now thousands. And they've now gone south as far as Venezuela. This isn't just an invasion, explained Dr. Carrie Manfrino, research director at the Central Caribbean Marine Institute. This is an explosion. No invasive tropical fish species has ever survived so successfully outside its own home ecosystem like this. Regular diving expeditions to cull lionfish have been authorized by Cayman Islands Department of the Environment in collaboration with the Institute. But no one is sure that anyone can catch enough lionfish to make a difference. One study in the Bahamas showed that lionfish reduced native species populations on one reef by almost 80%. Back on Grand Cayman, 100 miles away from the reefs of Bloody Bay, I make another discovery about lionfish. They taste delicious. At Michael's Restaurant at the popular Kamana Bay waterfront development, well heeled tourists and residents are being offered a new dish. Flash fried fillets of lionfish flavoured with chilli, fennel and mustard seed. Chef Thomas Tennant says he can't get enough of them. They cook beautifully, he tells me enthusiastically. Perhaps in the end, that may be the answer. This is one reef fish we can eat with a clean conscience.
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Narrator/Presenter
Tim Ecot Tucking in in the Cayman Islands Travelling by air in South America may seem a good idea. It's by far the quickest way of getting around a huge continent and relatively safe. Using the roads in many South American countries is a dangerous business. Statistics about accidents, deaths and injuries can be alarming, but plane travel there is notoriously expensive. Most people can't afford it, so they take the bus on journeys which can last several days. It's like entering a whole new world, as Jonathan Fryer discovered when he left a small Paraguayan town en route for Bolivia.
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Jonathan Fryer
The bus from Philadelphia to the Paraguayan military outpost of Maliscal Estegarribia dropped me unceremoniously by the roadside in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere. It was 10 o' clock at night and pitch black and eerily silent. Fortunately, a soldier loomed out of the shadows and pointed me in the right direction. Just walk along there a few kilometres till you get to the customs post, he said. The bus for Bolivia should pass by some time tonight. The wheels of my suitcase crunched across the gravel as I headed into the darkness. Not a single vehicle passed me, but at one point I heard a drunken man singing in the distance with relief. I eventually spotted what had to be the customs post, a brightly lit canopy a little off the road, but when I got there I found it was deserted. There were some garden chairs set out, but hardly had I sat down in one of them than a large peccary, or wild pig came rushing out of the bush and heading straight for me. I froze, but the peccary stopped just in front of me and enthusiastically licked my hand with its rough tongue before slumping down on my feet and falling asleep. There was no way I could move with 40 kilos of live pig meat pressed against me, so I pulled out a book and read while clouds of tiny mosquitoes had a feast. Six hours later my new friend trotted off when the customs men turned up in a pickup truck. Two burly men with guns in their belts. They joked with me good humouredly until the promised long distance bus arrived from Paraguay's capital, Asuncion. Then their faces turned severe and they pulled out their guns. They ordered all the passengers off with their luggage while they searched the vehicle for hidden drugs. It struck me as odd that anyone would want to smuggle drugs into Bolivia as it's a major drug exporting country. But the customs men were taking their job extremely seriously. We passengers queued at a little shack to get our ID cards checked or passports stamped. The immigration man had been fast asleep inside and didn't look pleased at being woken up to do his job. It was several hours drive from the Paraguayan customs post to its Bolivian equivalent, the bus bouncing and swerving along an unmade sandy road through the forest. This region is known as the Chaco, a desolate place of dry scrubland and trees. The guerrilla fighter Che Guevara hid out here for a while in the mid-1960s before being hunted down and shot. We had to get out of our bus at several Bolivian army checkpoints as dawn turned into day, the squat buildings painted with patriotic slogans and flags. Sitting outside one checkpoint, in front of a rickety kitchen table, there was a bowler hatted Andean woman, one hand holding down a large pile of Bolivian banknotes acting as an informal currency exchange. At the first petrol station along the road to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, while the bus's tank was being filled, the driver got out and bought himself a packet of coca leaves to chew to keep himself awake. The coca was on the same shelf in the service station shop as crisps and peanuts. We passengers, meanwhile, were all given a cling film wrapped portion of chicken and rice with and a fizzy drink to take back on board. During the whole journey, there wasn't a single rest stop as such, and people just shared the provisions they brought with them. Infants slept on the floor of the bus while the adults dozed or chatted, exchanging gossip and photos. Many were going to visit relatives who'd gone to work in the big city of Santa Cruz. By the time the afternoon sun was beating down on the vehicle, the only ventilation provided by the open windows, the passengers had formed a community just like a village. They made sure the frail old man at the back had enough water to drink and tease the nattily dressed youth who'd confessed he was travelling to see his girlfriend. They decided I must be a priest. Why else would a mature European be in the back of beyond? And it seemed unfair to disabuse them. Besides, as a priest, I was immediately accepted into their community. And when the bus finally drove into Santa Cruz, exactly 24 hours after I'd left Philadelphia, it was the city and its modern life that suddenly seemed foreign. I felt almost resentful at having arrived.
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Narrator/Presenter
And with that from Jonathan Fryer, a busload of new friends and a large and rather affectionate peccary We've reached the end of this edition. There'll be more from around the world next Saturday. Do join us. Goodbye.