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From Our Own Correspondent
Risking Everything
00:27:54
The people behind the news headlines: the migrants risking everything boarding flimsy...
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You have downloaded from our own correspondent. This edition is the latest one broadcast on BBC Radio 4. And here to introduce it is Kate Ady.
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Hello. Once it was said to be close to hell on earth. Today, fertile fields produce three harvests a year. We find out how they tamed the sun blasted desert of northern Ethiopia. They are queuing outside the shops in Venezuela, a result of the government's incompetence or perhaps an economic war against the country being waged by the US and Europe. And air pollution soaring to dangerous levels in Delhi. But why is the American Embassy buying up all the pot plants? The sun's out, the winds are light, the sea is calm. And along Italy's southern shores they know that means thousands more migrants may be on the way. The Italian Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, has warned that the civil war in Libya must first be stopped if the migration of people across the Mediterranean is to be halted. Mr. Renci, speaking in Washington yesterday, said the Mediterranean was a sea, not a cemetery. Many of those trying to reach the shores of Europe set sail from Libya. Quentin Somerville's there.
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What would you risk for freedom on a Libyan quayside? As the sun warmed us against the last gusts of a chill winter wind coming from the Mediterranean, 20 year old Mohammed from Gambia gave me his answer. He was risking everything. Life is difficult for us, for poor people like me, he said. That is why you see thousands of Gambians coming from Gambia to enter Italy to find their smooth life, a better life. Muhammad had just been pulled from a dinghy by the Libyan coast guard. It was packed with 90 men and women. There had been 92 when they'd set out. But two people had slipped from the boat early in the journey and drowned. There were a couple of hundred migrants on the quayside rescued from Mohammed's boat and another in the previous few hours. They were in a wretched condition. Most hadn't eaten or had water in 24 hours. A boy next to us, perhaps 16 or 17 years old, was shaking from exhaustion. I looked at his feet. He was wearing two mismatched sandals. They'd survived mostly on a handful of dates they'd gathered from palm trees before setting off on their journey. These two boats alone had people from Nigeria, Gambia, Somalia, Mali, Mauritania, Zambia, Sierra Leone, across Sub Saharan Africa. And it was a journey they had to make, explained Mohammed. Gambia was corrupt, he said. The President, he takes his cut of everything, he told me. Even when you've finished your studies, there are no opportunities for ordinary people. This was his fourth attempt at crossing to Italy and God willing, he he would try again, regardless of the risks. The Mediterranean has become the most deadly migrant route in the world. Last year, over 200,000 people attempted the journey. Over 3,200 died. And it's getting deadlier. The spring weather brings calmer waters. More attempt the crossing. Barely a week into this new season, already a thousand are thought to have died. That includes 400 who drowned in one shipwreck. They'd caught sight of a rescue vessel and in their excitement, people on board moved, capsizing their boat. Moments from salvation. Britain and the rest of Europe are partly to blame for the dramatic increase in the loss of life. The suspicion was that the expensive Coast Guard rescue mission off Italy was a magnet for migrants, encouraging them to make the journey. So it was cut back. Europe is, in effect, managing its migrant problem by letting them drown. I met dozens of people in the past week who'd attempted the crossing. They all understood that the odds of survival were now much shorter. But still they were risking the journey. They aren't being drawn by the promise of a warm Italian rescue. They're being propelled to Europe by poverty, hunger and misery. And they're being driven there by the deteriorating situation in Libya. It's a country now riven by rival militia, two opposing governments and the recent arrival of the Islamic State. For the hundreds of thousands of Sub Saharan Africans who work there, who wouldn't want to get out? It's the most dangerous game, said Mohammed. You know it, the journey is dangerous. But you believe it is only a one day journey. Even if you spend two or three years trying, one day you will get to Italy. He stared hard at the ground. You believe in it? I have to do it, really. It's my chance to get back to the world. For now, though, he was going to jail, or at least to a detention centre. But those words conjure up a neat facility with proper beds and medical help. In Libya's chaos, no such thing exists. Instead, migrants are crammed into filthy jails, hundreds to a room. The UN and other aid agencies are not much in evidence. On the outskirts of Misrata, I went inside the Kararim detention centre. Men, women and children are locked up together. In the space of a week, the numbers have doubled from 500 to 1,000. They share just two bathrooms. Some had been there for seven months. They tell of abuse and exploitation. There were bullet holes in the ceiling of one of the rooms. Where are we? Asked one man. I think from Pakistan. Is this a jail? Are we refugees? I met some of the men that I'd seen at the Quaysides earlier in the week. It was good to see them, and many said they were doing okay. But I couldn't find Mohammed. Later, back in my hotel room, an email arrived. I am Mohammed, the Gambian you spoke to. Now I am free. He'd escaped detention and was back at work in Tripoli, back at his job, saving for his next attempt to get to Europe.
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Quentin Somerville in Libya in this country, our candidates, well, some of them anyway, take part in heated TV debates. President Putin of Russia, though, prefers a phone in. Some 3 million people submitted questions, and during the call in this week, Mr. Putin played down the difficulties facing the Russian economy. The problem of capital flight from the country, he said, was nothing catastrophic. The Russian banking system was stable. Richard Kendall has been to see what people away from the capital, Moscow, make of life in Mr. Putin's Russia.
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On a small stage in a community hall still grandly called a palace of culture, a powerfully built lady belts out an old Russian Gypsy ballad. Then a choir of podgy teenage girls troop out, all dressed in sky blue party frocks like something out of the 1950s. The mostly elderly audience sitting in their raincoats on wooden chairs and listen attentively. It's a fitting mid afternoon concert to find in Oriol, a Russian provincial town which prides itself on its cultural heritage and its links to an extraordinary number of Russian authors. Ivan Turgenev, the 19th century Russian novelist of elegant love stories, came from here. So did Ivan Bunin, who won the Nobel Prize for literature the ingenious storyteller Nikolai Liskov, who the poets Tychev and Fiat, the short story writer Leonida Andreeeff. It's as if one small English town produced Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, The Bronte sisters, T.S. eliot and Philip Larkin, and many more. How did this one place give rise to so much literary talent? I asked the mayor, Sergei Stupin, who was taking me on a personal tour in his car, to show me all the writers statues. Who knows, he answered obliquely. Something in the air, perhaps. The director of the Turgenev Museum, an enthusiastic bibliophile called Viera Yefremova, was clearer. We're in the very middle of Russia, she said, and in tsarist times, Oriol was at the heart of a huge gubernia, or province, which covered a large area and included many estates. We like to call this the third literary capital of Russia, after Moscow and St. Petersburg. Last year we had 65,000 visitors. But it could have been so much more, she added wistfully. Like everywhere else in provincial Russia, Oryole is looking to Moscow to furnish more federal funding for upcoming anniversaries to rebrand ourselves, says the mayor, a former marketing man. But there's a long way to go before Oryol becomes a mecca for tourism. It feels trapped in time. When I arrived by train from Moscow, I was struck how reminiscent it was of the Soviet towns I'd known as a student. The centre had some charming streets and nice views over a high bank where its two rivers meet. But overall, it looked as though it had been largely bypassed by the Russian boom years. Roads filled with potholes, abandoned factory sites and some older parts of town where residents didn't even have indoor toilets or running water. They were collecting water in plastic buckets from a standing tap in the street. In political terms, Auriol is also a throwback. Curiously, the town council is half controlled by Communists, and far from focusing on the upcoming 200 year anniversary of Turgenev, their current obsession is to put up a statue to Stalin to commemorate his role as wartime leader. It's a talking point which has split the town. One young journalist launched an online petition in protest, which has already gathered thousands of signatures. But most people I spoke to told me a Stalin statue was a good idea. Yes, there'd been repressions during Stalin's years, but what he'd done during the war should never be forgotten. And anyway, Russia always needs a harsh leader, said one of the leading campaigners. A firm hand at the top, like Stalin or Putin. Meanwhile, the mayor, though he's allied to the Communists politically, says he's against it. A statue to Stalin would be too divisive in these difficult times, he told me. Possibly towing the official line from Moscow was what I thought. So is this the old story of the Russian provinces caught in a time warp through lack of investment and opportunity? Possibly. Oriol's problem is at heart, economic loss of factory jobs with nothing to fill the gap. Hence the protests. Vote for the Communists, whose rule has not helped, given their lack of interest in helping private enterprise to create local wealth. So everyone is beholden to the authorities. Everyone watches their back below the radar. However, there were some whispered criticisms of Putin, but only in private. One man even followed me down the street afterwards, scared, in case I didn't understand that I shouldn't use his name. And now Russia is in economic difficulties, and for these provincial towns, life has just got much worse. My guess is that people here will keep their heads down unless the crisis becomes so deep that they have nothing to lose by speaking out.
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Bridget Kendall in the Russian town of Oryol. In many parts of this country, it's been a week of glorious weather. But the blast of heat from France and Spain has also brought health warnings and pollution alerts. Contaminated air kills thousands of Britons year Some people with breathing and heart problems have been advised in recent days to avoid outdoor activities. The warnings coincide with high pollen levels. It's been difficult for hay fever sufferers too. But our big cities are still much cleaner than they used to be in the days when industry was heavier and homes had coal fires. The London pea soupers may have long gone, but other world capitals are not so lucky. Delhi is particularly bad. As Anu Anand has been finding out
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in London the other day, the most dangerous pollution particles, PM2.5, hit a high of 57. That's nearly six times recommended limits. Here in Delhi, we can only dream of such clean air. Our reading for these minute dangerous particles which penetrate the lungs, entering straight into the bloodstream is a staggering 21 times recommended limits. And that's better than it's been all winter. Until a few weeks ago, PM2.5 levels rarely dipped below 300, which some here have described as an airpocalypse. Like the rest of the world, those of us in Delhi believed for years that Beijing was the world's most polluted city. But last May, the World Health Organization announced that our own air is nearly twice as polluted. The result, we're told, is permanent lung damage and 1.3 million deaths annually. That makes air pollution after heart disease India's second biggest killer. And yet it's only in the past two months, as India's newspapers and television stations have begun to report the situation in detail, that my own family has been gripped, like many others, with a rising sense of panic. It's a bit like being told you're living next to an active volcano. At first, we simply shut all our doors and windows and sealed up numerous gaps. No more seductively cool Delhi breezes could be allowed in. We began checking the air quality index obsessively. Then we rushed out to buy pollution masks, riding around in our car looking like highway bandits. But our 3 year old wouldn't allow one anywhere near her face. And our son only wore his for a day, and only because I told him he looked like Spider Man. Despite our alarm, many deliites reacted with disdain. It's just dust from the desert, some insisted. Nothing a little homeopathy can't solve, others said. But we weren't convinced. When we heard that certain potted plants improve indoor air quality, we rushed to the nursery to snap up areca palms and a rather ugly spiky plant with the unappealing moniker Mother in law's tongue. But on arrival, the bemused proprietor informed us that the American Embassy had already purchased every last one. In any case, we calculated that to make a difference we needed a minimum of 50 plants. We could get rid of the sofa to make room for them, my husband offered. Instead, we borrowed an air pollution probe from a friend to work out what progress, if any, we'd made. Switching it on our PM2.5 levels registered an off the charts 44,000. My husband scratched his head, consulting the manual. This says 3000 is hazardous. It must be broken, I said. But it wasn't, so we had to call in the experts. One afternoon a young man turned up with a small freestanding air filter specially modified for Delhi's dust. He pressed a button which activated something called a plasma cluster. After 20 minutes, the numbers on our air monitor began to drop precipitously. My husband and I watched as the readings went down from 44,000 to to 20,000, then 11,000. Eventually the probe settled around the 1,000 mark. That's still worryingly high by global standards. And that's only the air inside our home. There's nothing we can do about the air outside. The government has announced that it will install more air quality monitors in Delhi and that it will ban diesel belching vehicles more than a decade old. But that's a drop in the ocean compared to India's pro growth economic policies, which still rely heavily on on subsidized dirty diesel. The trouble is, on many days you can't see the pollution. Right now, outside my window is an intensely blue sky filled with flocks of lime green parakeets and frangipani trees just beginning to unfurl their waxy fragrant blossoms. And I find myself wondering if it isn't perfectly okay to take my kids out to play football. But in the past few months, at least a dozen families we know have moved away, either to cleaner towns and cities or outside of India. And although I'm still lulled by the reassurances of long time residents, don't worry, it's nothing, they chide. I am beginning to wonder if it isn't time to think about moving too. Indeed, compared to Delhi, right now, London and even Beijing are looking like pretty good options.
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And in the Indian capital, that's Anu Anand. Now you might think the struggle between American capitalism and Latin American leftism is old news. There's nothing left to get het up about. Yet there's still considerable tension between the US and Venezuela. Since the charismatic Hugo Chavez died two years ago, the Venezuelan government has largely been sticking to his populist leftist politics. But current President Nicolas Maduro doesn't inspire the voters as his predecessor did, especially as they wrestle with economic realities. The price of crude oil, the country's main earner, has slumped. Productivity is down. Imports have fallen. But Maduro Borough and his ministers argue that at street level, queues and shortages are being manipulated by speculators hoarding goods and then exaggerated by a capitalist press. Ian Pannell's been out to the shops in Caracas.
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When is a queue not a queue? The least one can expect from a creditworthy foreign correspondent is that he or she can have a decent stab at making sense of the world. In Venezuela, this is more than the usual challenge. Here are the rough basics. The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is run by a socialist government that has, broadly speaking, used or misused its vast oil wealth to benefit some of the people some of the time and to keep itself in power. A combination of woeful economic management or mismanagement and the steep fall in oil prices has left the government with a serious cash flow problem. And it's left the people of Venezuela standing in queues across the country every single day, often for hours at a time. People are given time off work to queue. They get up early in the morning to queue, they queue in their lunch hour, they text each other about queues. So, not surprisingly, they become very good at queuing. As an Englishman, I like a good queue, well formed, orderly, no doubting who's in front of you and who's behind. There are many countries that don't respect this fine ancient tradition and prefer the first past the post system involving pushing, shoving and grunting. But on the whole, Venezuela is more like Britain with its queues. The difference is that in Venezuela, you're not waiting for the number 29 bus. You're queuing for milk, coffee, sugar, corn, flour, cooking oil, soap and even toilet paper. All are in severely short supply. The government regulates the price of these goods. It doesn't just subsidise them, it tells the producer what they can charge. That might just about make sense in a buoyant economy. But with inflation running at over 60% and the value of the currency plummeting, it appears producers are not only failing to make a profit, but are operating at a loss. Similarly, companies who export food to Venezuela have given up waiting to be paid by a government that's down on its luck. And and they're now sending their goods elsewhere. But the government and its supporters have a different narrative. They blame America and Europe and big business and smugglers for waging an economic war against the country, of trying to undermine President Maduro and the legacy of his predecessor Hugo Chavez, and of trying to turn the people against their government. They've told shopkeepers to move the queues underground into basements and subterranean car parks, apparently to protect their customers from getting sunburnt. Journalists are prevented from filming empty shelves. Shoppers have also been given instructions. You can only buy scarce goods on certain days of the week, depending on what number your ID card ends in. So for example, if it ends in a 0 or a 1, then you can stand in line on Monday. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that the milk or soap you want to buy the will be available on Monday. Another anomaly of what passes for a system is that often the shelves aren't empty at all. It's just the regulated goods that are in short supply. So if you want something else and you have the money for one of these higher priced goods, then you can often skip past a line and go straight into the shop. Often people join a queue without even knowing what's on sale. They get into line and then they ask the shopper in front of them what they are waiting for. It is highly likely that the person in front has done exactly the same thing with the shopper in front of them. The whole thing is like the game of whispers that children play. We saw one queue that only moved forward because people at the front gave up waiting and went hunting elsewhere. But if you were further back in line around the corner, say, you couldn't see this. You just had the illusion of momentum or progress and and were encouraged to stay and wait a little longer. On this occasion, there wasn't even anything to wait for. There'd been a rumour that the shop might be getting a delivery of something, no one knew what. But in the end there was nothing, just an empty loading bay. And so it goes on. It's a surreal symbol of a system that's broken and frankly makes little sense. Unsurprisingly, people are angry and frustrated. On occasion this has meant that queues have degenerated into riots and some shoppers had been robbed of their precious cargo while heading home. If shoppers continue to believe the official line that this is caused by Venezuela's enemies, then perhaps the government may be able to ride out the growing discontent. But many Venezuelans are no longer buying
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it, and that's Ian Pannell the famine which hit northern Ethiopia in the mid-1980s killed at least 400,000 people. And while it's often said that drought was the principal cause of the disaster, other factors, not least years, insurgency and civil war were to blame as well. Tigray, in the north, was one of the regions hit hardest. Its mountainous terrain had always posed problems for farmers. Rain didn't come for months, then it fell all at once, glancing off the cracked and degraded earth, sweeping away seeds and soil. But since the overthrow of the military government in 1991, local communities have been handed more responsibility for improving their land. And as Chris Haslam's been finding out, it's made quite a difference.
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In the pink streaked twilight, a river of humanity is flowing across Tigray's dusty Horcian plain. This cracked and desiccated landscape in Ethiopia's far north occupies a dark corner of the global collective memory. Thirty years ago, not far from here, the BBC's Michael Burke first alerted the world to a biblical famine he described as the closest thing to hell on earth. Then Bob Geldof wrote, do they know it's Christmas? A curious question to ask of perhaps the world's most devoutly Christian people. And thereafter, the name Tigray became synonymous with refugees, Western aid and misery. The Tigrayan people were depicted as exemplars of passive suffering, dependent on the goodwill of the rest of the planet, just to get through the day without dying. But here, in a steep sided valley outside the village of Abruhar Wa Atzbaha, I'm seeing a different version. From all directions, streams of people are trickling into that human river. You hear them before you see them, some chatting excitedly, others singing hymns. As they converge on a viciously steep valley at the edge of the plain, they were summoned before dawn by horns, an Old Testament echo calling every able bodied man and woman over 18 years of age to report for the first of 20 days of compulsory community labour. Their job, quite simply, is to tame the desert. This is how the Aksumite kings got stuff done 2000 years ago, says my guide, Zablon Baieni. And with the same tools too. By 10 in the morning, some 3,000 people have turned up. Using picks, shovels, iron bars and their bare hands, they will turn these treacherous slopes into neat staircases of rock walled terraces that will trap the annual rains, forcing the water to percolate into the soil. And rather than running off in devastating ground ripping, flash floods, sisters are doing it for themselves, says Kidani, a pick wielding Amazon whose arched eyebrow suggests I might want to put down my camera and do some actual work. Brothers too, from strapping sweat shiny youths to Ephraim, a legless old man who clearly ignored the bit about being able bodied and sits on his stumps rolling rocks downhill to the terrace builders. Overseeing this extraordinary effort is 58 year old Abu Hawy, Abrahawe Atsbaha's community leader. Short, potbellied and bearded, he darts from one side of the valley to the other barking orders into his mobile phone, slapping backs and showing the youngsters the proper way to split half ton boulders. Rumour has it that Abu Hawy once took up arms to fight for Tigrayan independence. But these days he prefers to describe himself as just a farmer. Either way, his tireless leadership has brought a miraculous transformation to this sun blasted land. In just a decade, entire mountains have been terraced. Once he had to dig 50ft down to find water. And now it's only 10 and 94 acres of former desert have been turned into fertile fields. Families are now reaping three harvests a year of corn, chillies, onions and potatoes. Free range grazing for sheep, goats and cattle has been banned, allowing new fore of eucalypts and acacia to take root. And Abu Hawi is particularly keen to show me what he's done with the deep flash flood canyons that rive the plain. We take a long hot hike to a vast pool of cool green water held back by a huge hand built dam. We've built 85 of these check dams so far, says Abu Hawi, and you can see how they work. These mini reservoirs fill up during the rains and are fed by groundwater in times of drought. Now every farmer has a well. He tosses a handful of dust into the wind. Ten years ago that was our land. Then he points at a shimmering blue flash in the reeds. Now look, we've got malachite kingfishers living in the desert. But success brings its own problems. Abrahha Waiatzpahar is now facing an immigration problem as people from neighbouring valleys clamour for their share of Abu Hawi's oasis. They shouldn't need to come here, he says. Every district in Tigray is supposed to be using compulsory community labour for terracing, but well. He shrugs with just a tad of false modesty. Not all community leaders are so committed. And as fear of starvation fades, Abu Hawi faces new demands. People want electricity now. HE sighs and there are calls for him to enter the hazardous world of Ethiopian politics. But I'm interested in his views of where God comes into all this. After all, this valley was once the physical definition of the term God forsaken. Abba Hawy disagrees. God was here when the land was bad, he says, and he's still here. But God will only help those who help themselves.
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Chris Haslam with those helping themselves in Ethiopia. And that's it. More correspondence stories from around the world next Saturday morning at half past eleven. I hope you'll join us. Goodbye.