← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Nov 27, 2010
00:27:38
Why Pakistan's flood victims feel they've been let down by their rulers – Jill been...
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- [00:00]
Alan Johnston
Hi, this is Alan Johnston. We make two editions of from our own Correspondent. If you'd like to hear the version
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BBC World Service Announcer
I introduce on the BBC World Service,
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Alan Johnston
you can find it by going to the BBC iplayer.
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Justin Marozzi
But here's the one broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
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Alan Johnston
It's presented by Kate AD.
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Lucy Ash
Today, the Pakistanis who blame the government for the devastation caused by the summer floods, arrested the Russians who use humour to protest about police brutality and corruption. We join the crowds at a big football tournament controversially being held in Yemen and shame and horror in New York. Why? Delegates and correspondents have been steering clear of the BBC office at the un. It is now more than three months since the floods in Pakistan submerged vast tracts of the countryside. As winter approaches, about 7 million people still don't have adequate shelter or bedding to keep warm and many are turning their anger upon the government. Jill McGivering covered the floods at their height and is now back in Pakistan investigating allegations of official mismanagement and corruption.
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Alan Johnston
Patani's eight children play with metal bottle tops. They grate them together to make a noise. They shake them in cupped hands like dice and throw them. They tie string round them and drag them through the dust. They fight over bottle tops because it's all they have. Everything the family owned was swept away in the flood. Bettani herself has a proud face with strong cheekbones and fierce eyes. As she talks to me, she pulls her toddler into her lap and puts him to her breast to stop his coughing. The other children cluster round her in the small tent which is now their home. It's cold at night, Bettani tells me the wind blows right through and we don't have decent blankets. No one can sleep. Their plot of land tells the story for them. The tent is surrounded by piles of brick and planks of wood salvaged from their ruined house. Their crops, cotton and wheat, have been washed away. Now the fields are contaminated by thick deposits of sand. The family doesn't blame nature, it blames the government. Millions of pounds were allocated to the repair of a huge concrete barrage to control the flow of the River Indus. But they say much of it was squandered, so when the floods came, they weren't protected. There have been other accusations too, that local officials colluded with rich land owning families, diverting water away from their land and inundating the poor. Instead of. The allegations are so persistent that the provincial government has launched an official inquiry to address them. Patani and her family live in southern Punjab, one of the regions worst affected by the floods. It's normally known as Pakistan's breadbasket, a lush, fertile region. But whole swathes of the province now look like desert colour, and crops have gone. Instead, there's a dusty barrenness, a vast expanse of sand dotted with the wreckage of broken homes. The government is spending many millions here. It's rolling out a mammoth cash compensation scheme and distributing everything from seeds and fertiliser to tents and blankets. And yet, every time I stop, people press round me to beg for help. Old ladies clutch my arms and weep, saying they're cold, hungry and desperate. Occasionally the simmering anger boils over. I spotted a small government compound where blankets were being handed out. As soon as I got out of the car, people crowded round me, waving pieces of paper in my face and shouting complaints. They'd spent days standing in queues, they said, sent to one government office after another, collecting stamps and signatures. And at the end of all that, they still received nothing. One man claimed that the officials inside were only giving blankets to their friends and associates. They have blank forms, he said, and falsify them. I try to fight my way inside the building where the blankets are being distributed so I can see for myself. The enraged women hang from my arms and shoulders, clawing past each other as they move with me. But by the time I reach the blankets, the official has fled. He heard you were coming, I'm told. He ran out through the back door. Time and time again, I hear the same cry. That the system's corrupt, that only people with connections get the aid, that the poor are left with next to nothing. As winter creeps in in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, I drive out to a heavily fortified government compound to see the Interior Minister, Raymond Mallock. His staff serve me tea and cream cakes as I wait. Then I'm ushered into an ornately furnished reception room. Mr. Malick shakes his head when I describe the people's allegations of government corruption and fraud. People have lost everything, he says. Of course they're angry. Did you think they'd be dancing? So this grassroots fury is not linked to the government's performance? I ask. Absolutely not, he says. He smiles at me benignly and suggests I've been deceived that the weeping old ladies and furious farmers who crowded round me with such passion were in fact planted by the political opposition just to discredit the government. He shakes his head with the indulgence of a father. People are very simple, he explains, and he launches into an anecdote to illustrate his point about the foolishness of the poor. A mother wants to visit her daughter, he says. She goes to the railway station and tells the ticket. Give me a ticket to where my daughter lives. The collector says, how do I know where your daughter lives? But she just repeats, give me a ticket to where my daughter lives. She expects him to know. The minister's smile broadens. I try to imagine going back to Pattani in her small, draughty tent, surrounded by eight children. I wonder how amused she'd be by the minister's story about the ignorant woman. The government system is working, I tell her. It isn't corrupt. I have it on the highest authority. The problem is, you're just too simple to understand.
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Lucy Ash
And that was Jill McGivering, a journalist beaten to death in a Siberian police cell, a senior officer on a drunken shooting spree in a Moscow supermarket, a kidnapped businessman in the boot of a patrol. Almost every day there seems to be a fresh scandal involving Russia's police. The Moscow Academy of Sciences found that one in every five citizens is tortured, beaten or harassed by Interior Ministry officers each year. So it's not surprising, as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin himself admitted, that most Russians cross the street at the very sight of a man in uniform. But Lucy Asch has been finding out that some have found their own way of dealing with the lawless.
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BBC World Service Announcer
Law enforcers the country was transfixed this summer by a group of six young men from a remote village in primoria in Russia's Far east who declared a guerrilla war on the police. In a video made when they were hiding in the forest, they wave guns at the camera and boast about their exploits, including stabbing a policeman to death. Astonishingly, many people hailed them as heroes. TV news began calling them the Primorsky Partisans. Kremlin officials were furious and instructed the media to label them bandits instead. Eventually, two were killed in a shootout and the rest are behind bars awaiting trial. But in Vladivostok, the regional capital, I saw walls daubed with graffiti. Partisans, your courage is not forgotten. Back in Moscow, I met another set of young people equally determined to fight the police. But although the name of the group is Vaina, or war, their methods are non violent and their weapons are satire and showmanship rather than knives and shotguns. Last June, the politically conscious art collective caused a stir when they painted a huge penis on a drawbridge in St Petersburg. As the Liteny Bridge opened to let ships pass down the Neva, the erech phallus, 65 meters tall and 27 metres across, sent an unmistakable message to a building directly opposite the local headquarters of the KGB's successful officers, the Federal Security Service. In another stunt designed to expose police impunity, one member of the group went into a supermarket wearing a police uniform. He filled five bags with the most expensive food he could find and calmly walked out without paying. Nobody challenged him. Still more daringly, in September, Weinar members overturned several police patrol cars that involved 31 activists, four, five to do the heavy lifting, while the rest filmed what was happening, acted as lookouts or distracted police by pretending to be lost tourists. Having seen their videos on the Internet, I was keen to meet people from Weinar, but it proved tricky. I'd been emailing someone called Sandra. She wouldn't give me a phone number, but arranged a late night rendezvous outside a Moscow metro station. As I stood waiting, I realized I had no idea what she looked like. To make matters worse, a guy in a hooded blue jacket kept eyeballing me. I turned my back and walked a few paces away. Lucy, he said. Lucy from BBC. I swung around defensively. Pleased to meet you, he said. I'm the Sandra you're waiting for, but you can call me Thief. It dawned on me that this bloke with a scraggy blond beard must be Alia Gvarotnikov. I recognise the activist who dressed as the shoplifting policeman and one of the founders of vi. He set it up three years ago with a bunch of fellow students from the philosophy department of Moscow State University. Standing next to him, a small, pale faced woman in a woolly hat was introduced as Kazlyonok, or Little Goat. She's a physics graduate and her day job involves cancer research. There was a one and a half year old toddler clinging to her coat called Casper. I also met Vayner's president, Crazy Leonia. He's famous for climbing onto a state security officer's car with a blue bucket on his head to protest against the widespread use of blue emergency lights by officials who can't be bothered to wait in Moscow's traffic jams. Why wasn't he scared of getting run over or arrested, I wonder. Our society has lived in fear for so many decades. We're trying to wake it by kicking it, replied Leonia. People see what we did and understand. You can live in a different way. You can be braver. Suddenly Vorotnikov is on his hands and knees on the rain slicked pavement, showing me how he crawled into one Moscow police station which had a reputation for racism. The officers there treated local immigrants like animals, so we got down on all fours and turned their station into a farmyard. Then we formed a human pyramid and began reciting avant garde poetry. The police looked on, dumbfounded, confused by the fact that the activists had arrived with cakes, tea and a huge portrait of the Russ president. They were desperate to get rid of us, said Kazlyonok, but at first they thought we were officials from the Kremlin. I was struck by Weinar's courage and ingenuity and frankly amazed that in today's Russia they'd got away with so many outlandish actions. But then a few days ago, Kazlyonok emailed me to say that both Aliyah and Leonya had been arrested on charges of hooliganism for overturning the police cars. They will be kept in pre trial detention for at least two months, and Aliag wrote to say that his cell is freezing and dark as a coffin. Kazlyonek tried to send him food and warm clothes, but her parcel was rejected. The St. Petersburg police must have little sense of humour.
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Lucy Ash
Lucy Ash the recent emergence of China as the biggest car market in the world is another indicator of the huge changes which are taking place in the world economy. More than 13 million vehicles were sold in China last year, many to first time buyers in the smaller cities where people are becoming steadily more prosperous. Once upon a time, and it wasn't long ago, it was the humble bicycle which got the masses on the move. The change to four wheels, as Peter Day has learned, has set some businessmen on the road to extraordinary wealth.
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Peter Day
When I first met him eight years ago, Yin Min Shang was standing on a greasy hillside in the middle of what may be the biggest city in the world, Chongqing, 900 miles up the Yangtze river from Shanghai. He was in the oily workshop where 10 years earlier he and a tiny team had started making motorcycle engines. Ten years later, his Li Fan Motorcycles group had become the second largest manufacturer in China. He was a rich man. This was a big change from the 20 years he had previously spent in prison during the Cultural Revolution. Yin Min Shang is a clever man. When he finally got out of prison, he started publishing school textbooks and then switched to motorcycle engines when publishing seemed a bit risky. After the events of Tiananmen Square the other day, I met Min Chang again. He was in Beijing for a celebration event for some of the people on the Hunan China rich list, the country's wealthiest. He told me how he's now pushed his motorcycle company into cars, a small scale car company in China, but a big exporter to countries such as Vietnam, Turkey, Uruguay and Iran. Min Chang is following his instincts. Once Again that at a certain stage of economic development, people want the simple sort of cars he can make, as with his motorcycles. Eight years ago, he told me now we have always targeted the countryside where the communist revolution started. Just one day later, I flew down to the extraordinary city of Shenzhen on the border with Hong Kong to revisit another car company. BYD started life 15 years ago as a battery maker and it now makes rechargeable batteries for a huge proportion of the world's mobile phones. But then BYD decided to make cars as well. Electric cars driven by battery. Two years ago, I was one of the first Westerners to drive the dual petrol battery powered F3 model. I was pretty impressed by a 13 year old battery company that had built a car plant from the ground up in just 15 months. It's a growth rate commonplace in the astonishing city of Shenzhen, which has grown from a population of 78,000 people 35 years ago to a vibrant city of 14 million people today. This time I went there to meet the company founder Wang Chuan Fu, also near the top of the rich list. In his BYD uniform, he looked like a factory line manager, but his identity badge gave him away. Employee number 0000001. A quietly spoken chemist, Wang Chuanfu told me about his hugely ambitious plans to build electric cars for a country rapidly becoming more aware, so he said, of environmental issues. BYD stands for build your dreams. It already employs almost 200,000 people. And he repeated the business strategy which so shocked me when I first encountered it two years ago. Number one in China by 2015. Number one in world car production by 2025. After my encounter with the boss and a spin in the all electric car he's now making for taxi fleets that recharges in just one hour, a BYD driver in a petrol powered car took me to a less salubrious part of the city. There I met a young woman who represents the other side of this Chinese industrial revolution. Ching Tong became a migrant worker in Shenzhen at the age of 18. She found the work of checking computer parts repetitive, boring, soul destroying. It's the plight of millions of cheap laborers who flooded into the cities of from the countryside in search of a better life. Assembling famous brand consumer goods for the world. Ching Tong went on to work as a supervisor at the vast Foxconn factory. Its 400,000 employees assembled products such as Apple iPads. Foxconn recently hurtled into world headlines with a spate of migrant workers suicides that forced the company to erect safety nets under the windows of the corporate dormitories. Ching Tong was not overly critical of her Foxconn experience, but she said that after 30 years of this economic system, a new generation of migrant workers feel homeless, far away from their real homes, without any spiritual life or permanent resident status in their adopted cities. For 30 years, China has built a new export led economy on cheap labor from the countryside, and now that disconnected workforce is beginning to seek recognition of the things it's created in a country still aiming to be global number one in economic terms. Sometime around 2030 Peter Day Yemen has
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Lucy Ash
not attracted the most positive headlines this year. The west sees it as a source of terrorism. Recently it was linked with attempts to blow up US Bound cargo planes, and just this week there have been two suicide attacks in which more than 20 people have been killed. Some therefore might conclude this is not the ideal place to stage a big international football competition. Nevertheless, and amid heavy security, the Gulf cup tournament kicked off in Yemen this week. Justin Marozi, who has been mingling with the excited crowds, says the event's had its surprises.
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Justin Marozzi
When I told a friend I was off to Yemen for the Gulf cup of nations football tournament in Aden, he asked me if I was insane. He wasn't alone. According to one newspaper, this was the most dangerous region of the most dangerous country on earth. The headline in an American magazine expressed the reaction of many Al Qaeda bombings, drive by, shootings and penalty kicks. What are they thinking? I asked another friend, a distinguished sports writer, if he fancied a few days out in the Gulf. Out of the question, he said. His wife wouldn't let him go. On the surface, it seemed only reasonable to question the wisdom of staging an international football tournament in the heartland of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, on what is already being referred to as the new front line of the war on terror. And for once, this wasn't a uniquely Western view. Some of Yemen's neighbours had their doubts, too. There were wobbles from Kuwait and Bahrain before they decided to grin and bear it and join the six other Gulf countries. In Aden, a Yemeni friend told me of the Arab tourism minister who'd got the jitters and frantically prepared a will before his flight to Yemen. Then I got here, he said later, and on my first day in Aden, I found myself wandering through the streets at 2 in the morning, speaking to people, eating outside in restaurants, thoroughly enjoying myself. I was completely comfortable. You have to wonder what the Iraqi footballers, who've lived through an inferno of violence since 2003, made of all the fuss in the Run up to the tournament, the government launched an unprecedented security operation involving more than 30,000 troops. That didn't mean people weren't worried about the opening ceremony and the match that followed it. Yemen versus Saudi Arabia. What chance. An Al Qaeda spectacular. I watched the game in the city's main stadium, packed way beyond its capacity of 30,000. In scenes that made Western security experts wince, fans crowded up and down gangways, sat and stood and danced on the stadium's outer rim and filled every space available. The women wrapped in black abayas, were easily the noisiest, cheering wildly and waving the national red, black and white flags of Yemen deliriously. A few rows down from me was a boisterous Saudi fan surrounded by Yemenis. From time to time, he broke into exuberant song, waving his green and white Saudi flag. Each time his team scored, he jumped up and started dancing and yelling in glee. His celebrations would have struck most British observers as provocative. I couldn't help cringing if he wasn't careful. I thought this triumphalist Saudi would end up being lynched by insulted home fans. In England he wouldn't have lasted long, but then in England he wouldn't have been standing with rival fans in the first place. The Yemenis didn't beat him up. On the contrary, they saluted him and joined in with his songs. The atmosphere was electric, the joy infectious. Yemen has been confounding foreign visitors like this for centuries. The birthplace of Arab civilization has seen a succession of foreigners come and go. The Portuguese, Ottomans, British and Russians have all been bamboozled by a famously complex country. I certainly wasn't expecting to see a statue of Queen Victoria in her pompous proudly displayed in one of Aden's public parks. So much for Al Qaeda's heartland. For their part, Yemenis don't always understand the outside world either. They're slightly baffled by the reaction to the parcel bomb that wasn't Al Qaeda's failed plot hatched in Yemen to down a US bound cargo plane. It strikes them as Western hysteria. In the end, the only thing spectacular about the opening evening of the tournament is was the result. A thumping four nil thrashing by the Saudis. Yemenis love their football, but like English football fans, have grown used to a team that traditionally disappoints Justin Marozzi in Aden.
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Lucy Ash
These have been difficult days for our colleagues working at the United nations building in New York. Not because of something we said about the UN or how its representatives conduct themselves around the world. No, the BBC people there feel they are being avoided the diplomats, who only a short time ago seemed eager to come and be interviewed, now all seem to have better things to do. Even the other correspondents based at the building in Manhattan no longer seem keen to drop by to gossip or talk stories and contacts. Barbara Plett tells us why the corporation's outpost alongside the east river has become
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Alan Johnston
so unpopular in recent days.
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Barbara Plett
There's been a buzz of activity in the UN's corridors of power. Intense discussions in the hallways, reporters conferring in hushed tones, a flurry of emails. Are the Palestinians about to declare statehood? Is the Security Council about to authorize a military strike on Iran? Is civil war breaking out again in Sudan? Nope. Something of much greater import if you're a UN correspondent. A creeping infestation of bed bugs. This is a scourge currently afflicting New York, with the bugs running rampant through hotels and if one believes the rather hysterical media coverage spreading in an uncontrolled contagion to buildings such as theaters, shops, restaurants and homes. Now, bed bugs are not dangerous or life threatening. Although their bites itch and sting. The real pain is that once a place is infested, a major and expensive fumigation process is required to get rid of them. A month ago, the UN finally admitted it had been battling the blood sucking pests in various parts of its sprawling office complex for more than a year. So their eventual discovery in the UN media centre had about it an air of grim inevitability. There's only one way to sniff out bedbugs. That's right, dogs. If a dog smells a bedbug, he or she will bark. So at the demand of the UN press corps, Rover or some version of him, was enlisted and we waited with bated breath for the results. The email came at midnight. And yes, unlike the famous Sherlock Holmes story in which the dog doesn't bark in the nighttime, this time it did. In two studios no less, and one of them was ours. Oh the shame. Oh the horror. But what to do? At first we had very quiet conversations about fumigation, trying to delay the inevitable exposure. It was hopeless, we agreed, worse than the BBC having bedbugs would be for the BBC to cover up having bedbugs. In any case, everyone already knew one of the banes of working in a media center where journalists have a Rover like nose for stories. Some turned it into a joke, one through fear to the wind, and knocked on our door to express solidarity. I know what it feels like to be stigmatized, he said. I've had bedbugs. But most gave the BBC office a wide berth. In panic, I turned to my husband. He was dismissive. This terror of bedbugs is ludicrous, he said. It's all part of the culture of fear in America. The latest version of Reds under the bed. First it was communists, then Obama, the Islamist terrorist, and now bedbugs. Others, accustomed to the intrigues of the un, pushed the conspiracy theory further. The question here, said one, is why has the BBC been singled out? I was in no mood to start drawing up an imaginary list of saboteurs, especially since the bugs in my studio were not of the old fashioned spy variety. Still, at this stage, none of us had actually seen any sign of the terrible beasts, not even a bite. I asked the man in charge of the UN's bedbug operations to describe one. I looked up to him as a kind of Indiana Jones of bedbug search and rescue, hunting them down in the nether regions of the UN with his canny canine. I don't know, he answered. I've never seen one. We go by the dog. If it barks, we're on the scent. If it barks a lot, we get a second opinion from another dog. These dogs are in great demand, the new heroes for panicked New Yorkers. But there are also complaints of false positives, of dogs detecting bugs that aren't there. It was a thought to cheer me as the fumigations continued. The bugs were barked out of our studio, the but then sniffed in the press conference room. More inspections are slated. How bad is it? Asked a correspondent from the rival CNN network, clearly worried that the bedbugs were on the march. I don't know, I said gravely. All we know is that the dog barked. Ha. That means nothing, he said, shifting instantly from concerned colleague to competitor. I also bark when I pass a BBC studio.
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Lucy Ash
Barbara Pleth there, and a ticklish problem for the BBC in New York. And bringing this edition to a close, I'll be here again with more from our own correspondence around the world next. I do hope you'll join us.
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Alan Johnston
Goodbye.