← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Revolutions are Unpredictable
00:28:23
'When change happens, it can happen very, very fast,' Steve Rosenberg in Ukraine.
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This is a download from the BBC. It's the latest edition of From Our
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Own Correspondent, broadcast on Radio 4 and
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it's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Hello. Today a nightmare unfolds in the city of chestnut trees. There's a message from Cairo to Kiev. Revolutions can be a very long game and are notoriously unpredictable. A man sells a bird and starts a mental hospital in troubled Somalia. And it's too late now to put the clock back to 1788. As bushfire season ignites in Australia, the historians wonder were the Aborigines better at taming the elements? The new cabinet in Ukraine has been meeting this morning to discuss the deepening crisis over Russia's reported military deployments in the semi autonomous region of Crimea. The acting president, Oleksandr Turchinov, accused Russia of deploying hundreds of soldiers as well as military aircraft in Crimea. Last night, President Obama bluntly warned Moscow that there would be cop costs if Russia intervened militarily in Ukraine. Steve Rosenberg says events are moving swiftly there. It's a revolution which is far from over.
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I've been reminded this week that when change happens, it can happen very, very fast. When I woke up last Saturday, Viktor Yanukovych was still Ukraine's president and his arch rival Yulia Timoshenko, the former prime minister, was still a prisoner and under police guard in a hospital 250 miles east of Kiev. By the evening, everything had changed. Ms. Timoshenko was up on stage in Independence Square in Kiev, making fiery speeches from her wheelchair. Mr. Yanukovych had been removed from office by parliament and was on the run. And I was strolling through his back garden, marvelling at the opulence of his mansion, his private golf course and the ostrich farm, and checking out the Jacuzzi in his luxury spa. What a difference a day makes in Ukraine. I'll never forget the moment the gates to Viktor Yanukovych's presidential compound swung open and the public poured in to look around. This was not an angry crowd baying for blood and revenge. People were just curious to see how their president had lived. Strolling through the vast grounds, there were mums pushing prams. People posed for photos by the mock Roman ruins next to cages with pheasants and in front of a giant galleon, a banqueting hall in a boat. So this is what they've spent all our tax money on? One visitor said to me, shaking her head in disbelief. On guard in Mr. Yanukovych's sauna were members of the Independence Square Self Defence Brigade, a force which has played a key role in this revolution. No marks on the furniture, please. They barked to stop visitors trying out the plush three piece suite near the plunge pool. We don't want anything damaged, you know, we don't want the world to think that we're hooligans. No marks on the furniture. It seems such an incredibly ordinary thing to say when you consider the horrors this city experienced just two days earlier, when dozens of people, most of them protesters, were shot dead by pro government forces right outside our hotel. After the violence broke out, the hotel foyer was turned into a makeshift field hospital and a morgue. Corpses were laid out near reception. They were covered up with hotel bedsheets. That afternoon, after the shooting had died down, a medical volunteer called Alexander came up to me. I want to show you something outside, he said, so that you understand what war really means. We left the hotel, walked round the corner onto Institutska street and stopped. You see that black hat lying on the ground? Alexander said. Well, if you look closely, you can see there's a sliver of someone's brain inside. I'm going to collect it and try to match it to one of the bodies back at the hotel. We must return it to the right person, because that was a piece of someone's mind, someone's intellect, that was someone's thoughts. I think that Alexander was in shock. Probably so was I. At that moment I just couldn't believe I was in Kiev. That this nightmare was unfolding in what is one of the greatest cities in the whole of the former ussr. A city of chestnut trees and sweet smelling coffee shops, of river cruises and concert halls. A city I'd fallen in love with back in Soviet times, when I'd lived and studied here for three months. It was this violence that triggered change. Whether or not Viktor Yanukovych personally gave the order for live rounds to be used on the protesters. The bloodshed sent his administration into into a tailspin. He claims that his removal from power is a coup, but even his own party has blamed him, disowned him, and denounced him as a coward for running away. But what now for Ukraine, its future post? Yanukovych is far from certain. The country has massive debts and requires urgent financial aid. It faces the threat of separatism too, as the dramatic events in Crimea suggest. Ukraine does now have a new government, but there will be no honeymoon period for this administration. The protesters I've spoken to on Independence Square tell me they are deeply suspicious of everyone in positions of power. They believe that it's the people, not the politicians who have forced change in Ukraine. For now, they seem determined to stay on the streets to make sure their new government doesn't deceive them.
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Steve Rosenberg, now back at his base in Moscow. And as he was suggesting, revolutions don't always produce immediate, clear cut improvements in the lives of ordinary people. Indeed, there's no guarantee that what comes after a revolution will be much different to what went before it. Or much better. Take the case of Egypt, where it's now three years since the autocratic leader Hosni Mubarak was toppled after a long period of chaos, Egypt seems to be heading inevitably towards replacing Mr. Mubarak, but not with a young liberal or an old Islamist, but with Abdelfattah Al Sisi, a man who, like Mubarak, comes from the upper echelons of the military high command. Kevin Connolly in Cairo says it's looking like the old regime will be replaced by one that looks a lot like it.
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At the chaotic height of Egypt's revolution against the brilliant teen autocrat Hosni Mubarak three years ago, every single member of the uniformed security forces suddenly disappeared from the streets. It felt like the last word in disorder. A police state with no police officers. They're long since back, of course, not bringing order exactly, but presiding pompously over a reduced level of chaos. You can watch as officers allow a teenager balancing a huge wooden tray of fresh flatbreads on his head to cycle the wrong way down a one way street with his hands in his pockets. Then a motorcyclist will follow, presumably on the grounds that a motorcycle is just a cycle with a motor on it. A motorist will then attempt the same manoeuvre. What, after all, is a car but two motorbikes connected in parallel? And only then will an officer officiously intervene. The police have their limits. The seething streets of Cairo are clogged and chaotic. Pedestrians and mopeds swarm dangerously around larger, slower moving vehicles like electrons in a chemistry diagram. Signs of renewed life are everywhere. Flatbed carts drawn by wiry little donkeys can be seen plodding along in the downtown traffic. They were banned from the centre of the city under Hosni Mubarak, presumably because they reminded him of Egypt's wretched rural poverty. Well, that and the donkey droppings everywhere. Big bottomed sheep carcasses hang outside butchers shops in more prosperous suburbs sporting the long, broad pink stripes of the slaughterhouses where they were processed. They look as though they died wearing cheerful windset pyjamas. But They're a sign that for well off Egyptians at least, a sense of prosperity has replaced the uncertainty. This time three years ago, the banks were shut and cash dispensing machines were empty. There are suddenly more foreign tourists about too. A sprightly group of middle aged American women stopped me in the garden of our hotel. Would I mind taking a selfie of them? Egypt feels as though it's lived through endless ages of political change since the fall of Mubarak, but it really has only been three years. There have been three constitutional referendums, for a start, the latest of which produced a document so comprehensive and so inclusive that it contains a pledge to protect the employment rights of dwarves. There have been countless rounds of parliamentary voting, the results of which have been annulled, and a presidential election which produced the first elected leader in Egyptian history, the Islamist Mohammad Morsi. He was removed from the presidential palace and installed in prison by the army last year. And after a fierce crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations, a kind of stability has been established. Most Egyptians give the credit for that to the armed forces and in particular to their leader, Field Marshal Abdel Fattah Al Sisi. He is credited with restoring national pride and with vanquishing lots of vague but sinister conspiracies in which Egyptians believed the Islamists were going to carve up this vast and ancient country and join the pieces willy nilly to neighbouring Muslim states. Hardly anyone in Egypt had heard of the Field Marshal until two years ago, and even now, very little is known of his early life or of his views on how to tackle Egypt's suffocating problems of poverty and overcrowding and unemployment. And yet he is now widely celebrated as a saviour of the nation. That says something about Egyptian political culture, of course, and the underlying hankering for a strong leader, preferably in a high ranking officer's uniform. But you can already buy chocolate frames with portraits of El Sisi laser printed onto a chocolate canvas within, and you don't get to that point without having some degree of charisma. He's delicious, by the way. The problem is that very few of the demonstrators who first bravely took to the streets to topple Mubarak would have hoped or guessed that three years on, Egypt would be back where it started, and indeed, where it's nearly always been in modern times, with the army in control of national life and a senior officer poised for high office. Revolutions, of course, are notoriously unpredictable. It used to be fashionable, to quote the Chinese leader Zhou enlai saying in 1972 that the events of the French Revolution of 1789 were too recent to be properly interpreted. In fact, that was a misunderstanding. He was actually talking about the Paris riots of the time, and thus offering a commonplace observation on the news rather than a slice of mystical Chinese sagacity. But if he had said what everyone thought he'd said, he'd have been right. Revolutions can be a very long game. Egyptians, like the rest of us, watched this week as Ukraine took the first steps down a road that Egypt has already travelled. And no one knows how all of that will turn out either. What we do know from Egypt is that revolutions sometimes have a way of
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surprising the revolutionary Kevin Connolly in Cairo, half a world away from there, and we're in Lancaster county in the American state of Pennsylvania. This is Amish country. Members of this strict religious group are known for their simple living, plain dress, and determination to turn their backs on much the modern technological world has to offer. They settled here in the 18th century after escaping persecution in their native Switzerland and southern Germany. Beth MacLeod has been to see a way of life that she thought would be dying out in modern America. Instead, she tells us, it's very alive.
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The white surface of the fields was mallowy in texture as the deep snow covering them started to melt. In the distance, up a little track, we saw a farmhouse flanked by outbuildings and a grain silo. The solid wooden barn looked like many others we'd passed along the way, but there was no sign of any tractors or trucks in the farmyard, and there was a long line of washing hanging up neatly, pegged out to dry in the crisp February air. All the clothes were black, stark against the snow, but a row of pastel towels and linen gave the sombre farm a festive air, like a jaunty line of bunting. It was the first sign we'd reached Amish country. Members of this Anabaptist sect wear simple dark clothes and reject cars, preferring to get around by horse and carriage. Their overriding principle is to avoid being yoked to the outside world, so they don't use Maine's electricity, opting for kerosene lamps to light their homes to each other. They speak Pennsylvania Dutch, a Germanic dialect that got its name from the German Deutsch. But they switch languages when dealing with outsiders, who, incidentally, they refer to as the English and deal with US English they increasingly do. We started seeing signs along the roadside for Amish markets, Amish quilts, Amish furniture shops set up to cater to the curious visitor. There were signs also of some tension. We passed a tiny schoolhouse that had a piece of paper taped to the do. No tourists, it said. We stopped at a bakery selling pies and pretzels. One of the shop walls was made of glass so customers could peer through at the bonneted Amish women kneading dough. In the kitchen there was a range of souvenirs for sale, homemade jam, salt and pepper shakers in the shape of an Amish couple, and romantic novels with wholesome titles. Amanda Wedd's A Good man seemed to be a best seller. The stillness outside was punctuated every now and then with the sound of trotting hoofs as another carriage swept past, its occupants barely visible but for a glimpse of a straw hat, we noticed a line of horses tethered to a railing outside one store, their carriages neatly manoeuvred into the parking spaces. This was very different to the tourist shops. I can't quite pinpoint why. Perhaps it was the quality of the light or the unfamiliarity of the old fashioned objects inside. But something about walking into that shop was like stepping back in time. It had everything that settlers from the old world would have needed in the new colony. Large sacks of grain were piled up next to bags of horse feed. Farming tools hung along one aisle. Huge hunks of cheese were on sale behind a counter. An Amish boy who had a mass of dark hair cut slightly askew showed us where the water was kept and cheerily rung up the total we owed on the cash register. The modern world is increasingly encroaching on Amish communities. Strip malls are built ever closer to settlements. Their carriages ride along ever more congested roads. And yet, far from dying out, the Amish are one of the fastest growing religious groups in America. They are thriving. Their population has more than doubled in the past 25 years, to 250,000. It's expected to double again in the next 20 years to half a million. One reason is that the Amish tend to have very large families. The other reason is that the vast majority of Amish children decide to stick with the religion when they reach adulthood. They stop school at around age 14, so their choice of profession and experience of the outside world is limited. This population explosion means that new Amish settlements are springing up around the country, far from their traditional homes in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Some are venturing out west, starting communities in states like Montana. The real hot spot to head for at the moment is New York. Not the skyscrapers of Manhattan, but the rural part of the state where farmers are selling their land off cheaply, barely a 10 minute drive from the store, we were on the motorway home, back among the lights of familiar fast food chains and coffee outlets that the US has exported all around the world. It seemed amazing to me that here in the heart of America, this group remains so determinedly different, unyielding to the insistent homogenising thrum of globalisation.
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And that's Beth MacLeod. The wildfire season's well underway in Australia. The state of Victoria's been worst hit so far. Temperatures have climbed into the 40s and there's been little significant rainfall, the authorities say. With continuing hot weather and strong winds, conditions are at their worst since 2009, when wildfires killed more than 170 people and destroyed about 2,000 homes. Some experts say that climate change in Australia means the heat waves are becoming longer and more frequent. Jim Carey's just back from New South Wales, another state expecting a difficult bushfire season.
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I'm only an hour into visiting a retired couple just north of Sydney when I realise Bill Plant has left the room and not come back. Must have smelt smoke, suggests his wife, Julie. Bill's compunction is a lifetime in the making. An olfactory fire alarm he shares with many of his fellow compatriots. If you find fire, you phone neighbours, get buckets and go help, Bill explains upon return. Largely ascribed to global warming, average temperatures are increasing in Australia. The land dries crisp and tinderbox very quickly. And one careless cigarette butt, bolt of lightning or piece of broken glass can instigate voluminous bushfires which race and rage across the land, incinerating everything in their path. The most prolific tree in the Australian bush is the iconic eucalyptus, nicknamed the gum tree and described to me by one fireman as a living firebomb. The bark of the tree falls away in thin flammable sheets, a touch paper to any passing spark, whilst the air in and around a eucalyptus forest hangs with the menthol oil for which the tree is globally renowned. An incendiary haze which sometimes fuels the air to burn by itself. The Blue Mountains are a vast carpet of heritage listed forest in the state of New South Wales, so named because from a distance, this cloud of oil gives the mountains a slate blue hue. At the end of last year, ferocious fires burnt 200 homes to the ground. Here, on my way to view the damage three months on, the car radio warns of another fire alert in the neighboring state of Victoria with the ominous words, it is now too late to leave the area. Ready yourself. When I arrive at Yellow Rock, the scorched valleys are a surreal sight. Heavily blackened trunks stand stubborn in the burnt dust. But sprouting from their spiky tops are iridescent explosions of green shoots. Everything about the eucalyptus is designed to catch fire, spread fire and then grow back once its competitors have been destroyed. In that fire, observes Bill Gammage, I'm crouched on a heat cracked rock overlooking a valley of burnt bush talking to Bill, a semi retired history professor from the Australian National University. What people have forgotten is that a lot of these trees weren't here when the Europeans first arrived, he asserts. As a historian, Bill examined thousands of old eyewitness testimonies, paintings and drawings and found that before the Europeans arrived, places like the Blue Mountains contained significant amounts of grass pasture. His book on the subject won the Prime Minister's Literary Award. Having lived and evolved on the continent for millennia, Aborigines managed the land almost like a garden, effectively using expertly controlled fires to keep the flora in check. The resulting grasslands not only attracted animals, which the Aborigines can hunt, they also provided massive fire breaks, preventing the kind of destructive fires Australia is increasingly suffering. When the Europeans arrived, they kicked the gardeners out of the garden and the garden went wild. The common notion fought for by the powerful green lobby in Australia is that eucalyptus forest is the natural state of Australia and that every tree must be protected. Hence you have to apply for a license to chop down even one tree growing near your house. It's too late to reverse the clock back to 1788, says Professor Gammage. But the kind of damage we're looking at today could be lessened if we employed Aborigines to do something they spent tens of thousands of years perfecting. Jack Saunders, a 17 year old New South Wales firefighter, is keen to show me his copy of the official bush firefighting manual. The chapter on fire prevention acknowledges that controlled burning may be used to maintain the natural condition of the environment and imitate the use of fire by its traditional owners over tens of thousands, thousands of years. But there is an odd tension here which rather unusually pitches conservation groups against an ancient knowledge. What exactly is the natural environment of Australia? Is it the massive forests which have proliferated since 1788? Or is it the Australia gardened by the Aborigines for the tens of thousands of years prior to that? In the burnt Blue Mountains bush, I reach down to pick up the charred husk of a seed pod. It comes from the Banksia shrub, the seeds of which are only released by the heat of flames. Another timely reminder of how along with the gum tree and the human being. Australia has evolved with and been forged by fire.
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Jim Carrey in New South Wales Somalia has one of the highest rates of mental illness in the world, with one in three people suffering from some form of mental health problem, according to the World Health Organization. This is perhaps not surprising given that the country has been in conflict for two and a half decades. In the last few days alone, there have been two devastating car bomb attacks in the capital, Mogadishu, causing heavy loss of life. Many mentally sick people in Somalia are chained up. Some are even put into cages with hyenas, as this is believed to cure them. One man there has dedicated his life to helping the mentally ill. Mary Harper has been to see him.
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That must be it, I say, pointing at a yellow wall painted with a picture of a large blue human brain. The Habab Mental Hospital My driver pulls the car up as close as he can to a gate in the wall and tells me to wait. Do not even think about opening the door, he says. My six bodyguards form a protective line from the vehicle to the hospital gate. When the word comes, I dart out and run between them, through the gate and into the hospital. This is Mogadishu, and you don't mess around. I find myself in a room crammed with metal beds. The spare patches of floor are covered with foam. Mattresses there, stretched out sometimes one, sometimes two, sometimes three, to a mattress are men. It's the middle of the day, but they're all lying down. Some are asleep. Others stare at me with dead eyes. They don't seem to be fully alive. The heavy stillness is broken when a man rushes in, dressed in a white coat. It's obviously seen better days, but it's clean and freshly pressed. His eyes sparkle. His voice is strained and high pitched. This is Habab, the nurse with three months mental health training who runs this hospital. Habab means in Somali, a voice which seems to be running out. And that's just what his voice sounds like, as if there's not much left of it. There are 132 patients in here, he says. Most of them are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. Many have schizophrenia. Their families bring them here years too late, and they all come here with their legs and arms in chains, because that's what Somalis do with mental patients. Here we have a no chains policy. Nobody in my hospital is chained. The men on the beds and mattresses on the floor don't react. I ask Habib why they're all lying down, because this morning they had Psychotropic drugs. They're happy now. Up until two years ago, the World Health Organization gave us drugs, but then they stopped for lack of funds. Now I buy them in the local market. Suddenly, Habab starts to weep. His voice gets even higher. It cracks and breaks. Tears are pouring down his face. His nose is streaming. Where's the United Nations? Where's the Somali president? The prime minister? The parliament? They all say Habab is a good person. Habab is a hero. But I don't need their words. I need action. I give Habab my handkerchief and we go to another room. Above the doorway, written in swirly black paint, are the words women's Ward. It's even quieter, even stiller. The same dead eyes, the same prostrate bodies. Habab sits with one lady, her head uncovered, her hair shorn. He holds her hand. She has postnatal depression, schizophrenia and anorexia. She can't sleep. She talks to herself. She has hallucinations, and she hears voices. When she came here, she was a skeleton. We leave the women's ward and walk outside. The sun is warm and bright. The odd burst of gunfire goes off somewhere not too far away. Habab tells me how in the last few years, at least 300 mental patients have been shot dead by the security forces in Mogadishu. They don't know that it's not safe to walk around at night, that you should stop at checkpoints. So they get shot in a covered area that's a bit like a barn for animals. I find dozens more male patients. Some of them are alert. A group of young men approach me. They speak English in a variety of accents. They tell me how they fled Somalia with their families when war broke out two decades ago, to Canada, to Holland, to Cardiff and London. I find it odd that so many Somalis from the diaspora are here in this mental hospital in Mogadishu. Some, it seems, were sent back to Somalia by their families after they got into trouble at home. Habab starts telling me about how he started the hospital after he saw five mentally ill women on the road being abused by small children who shouted rude words at them and threw stones. A young man, also in a white coat, interrupts him and takes up the story. I'm Mohammed Habab, son of Habab. When I was a child, I used to keep birds. One day my father came and took two of my birds. I was very upset. He took them to market and sold them for a dollar each. With those $2, he paid an artist to paint the name Habab Hospital above one room. That's how he started the hospital.
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Mary Harper in Somalia. More stories from around the world on Thursday and Saturday of next week. Why don't you join us? Goodbye.