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From Our Own Correspondent
the Kony film
00:28:18
A hundred million plus hits on the internet. Our Africa correspondent Andrew Harding...
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Presenter
Hello from Bush House in London, home
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Fergal Keane
to From Our Own Correspondent.
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Narrator/Reporter
You can hear the World Service edition of our programme by going to the From Our Own Correspondent website.
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Presenter
But this is a download of the
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Narrator/Reporter
latest broadcast on Radio 4.
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Andrew Harding
It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Narrator/Reporter
Today, police and former paramilitaries from Northern Ireland sit down to dinner in South Africa and talk of reconciliation. A Chinese ghost town. Does it mean the extraordinary pro property bubble there has finally burst? The Warlord film with 100 million Internet hits gets the thumbs down from an audience in Uganda. And in the Spice Islands of Indonesia, one of bird watching's high five moments. An appearance by a red bird of paradise. The decades of violence in Northern Ireland left behind them more than a thousand unsolved murders. As the peace process becomes a part of history, there's now demand for a new process, one which deals with the pain of the past. A group of A senior Northern Ireland policeman has just been to South Africa, along with several former IRA and loyalist paramilitaries. Fergal Keane, who was our correspondent in Ireland as well as in Johannesburg, says they were seeing what could be learned from the reconciliation process South Africa's been through in the years since the end of apartheid.
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Fergal Keane
On the evening before I left Belfast for good, I got into my car and drove for one last time around the city where I'd spent the previous five years of my life. I was leaving for Africa in the morning. This was long before a ceasefire. Sectarian murder gangs still roamed across the peace lines. Policemen were being shot in their homes. Young men from Cardiff, Glasgow and Newcastle patrolled the streets of Belfast in the uniform of the British Army. It was a city restive with the memory of death. Perpetually tensed for the next round of killing, I drove up the Lower Falls Road and onto the Springfield Road, passing the gates at Lanark Way that separated the Catholic west from the Protestant Shankill. A memory came back of a bizarre afternoon when an eccentric Catholic priest had decided he would ceilidance for peace on the ultra loyalist Shankle. I'll never forget his orange kilt flailing this way and that, his knobbly white knees scampering away as curses and threats chased him and the attendant media pack away from this Protestant citadel. That night I drove through every part of the city I'd reported from. I was saying goodbye to the places that had changed me as a journalist, but which also had altered my worldview. After this place, I would always, wherever I was, be alert to the toxic power of certain simple ideas. That the salvation of one group lay only in the defeat of the other, that a person's human worth was defined by their faith or tribe. Crucially, I'd learned there were no easy answers to the dilemmas of a divided society. I remembered those lessons for the next four years as I watched South Africa move from violence to democracy. Compromise followed compromise. Negotiators yielded before the forces of history, common sense, necessity and humanity. Those years came flooding back. On the shore at Camps Bay recently, There were about 30 of us at a convivial dinner looking out over a beach which, when I'd first visited Cape Town decades before, had been defaced by signs warning that the white sands and blue sea were for the enjoyment of white whites only. Now people of all races strolled and played in the roaring embrace of the surf. To my left, watching this, sat Chief Superintendent Stephen Martin, one of the most senior officers of the police service of Northern Ireland. To my right was Siano Walsh, a former IRA hunger striker and one of that group's longest serving prisoners. He'd spent a total of 21 years in jail. The IRA had murdered some of Stephen Martin's colleagues. Shiana Walsh had joined the organization knowing that death or prison were the likely consequences of his decision. There were other policemen and ex combatants at the table, former loyalist prisoners who would once have regarded me and the southern Irish state I came from as predatory enemies. They'd come to South Africa together to study the successes and failures of of that country's transition. In a week of travelling through townships and cities of meetings with policemen from the post apartheid force, with witnesses from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, they heard much to inspire, but also a great deal that was unsettling. Not least was the sense among the victims of past violence that they'd been forgotten, that the Truth Commission had given them neither justice nor or healing. Within the Irish group itself, there were tensions. How could there not be? A lot of history had followed them down across Africa, the spike of memory still turned inside. For those who'd lost friends in the Troubles, tough things were said. There were uncomfortable moments as opposing positions probed and sometimes collided. But for all that, their journey was a wonderful. I felt privileged to watch trust being built when I left Belfast two decades before, you would have been denounced as a fool or a lunatic to have predicted the historic compromise between Orange and green. I've often heard such cross community journeys cynically referred to as the soft peace process. But without such reaching out, and it's happening in many other ways in Northern Ireland and among old enemies in South Africa too, no lasting peace is possible. I remember the words of the great Ulster born poet, Louis MacNiece, a man of the island of Ireland, but of Britain too, who back in the 1930s in his poem Autumn Journal had written, there will be sunlight later. The equation will come out in the end. Not false hope at all, but the voice of a prophet.
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Narrator/Reporter
And that was Fergal Kean. 100 million plus hits on YouTube. Astonishing viewing figures for the emotive documentary about the blood stained Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. He's still at large. A Congolese rebel leader, Thomas Lubanga is not. He's been found guilty of using child soldiers and is being held at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. He'll be sentenced later. Andrew Harding has over the years reported extensively on the activities of both men and reflects now on the significance of these latest developments.
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Andrew Harding
I was hiding under a bed in a priest's house in the middle of a town called Bunya. It was 2003 and Bunya, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, was at the heart of a particularly vicious ethnic conflict. There were reports of cannibalism in the countryside, rival militia gangs fighting for control of the nearby gold mines, machete victims packed head to toe in the hospital. And at that precise moment, the sound of heavy gunfire on three sides of the house. The priest, a jovial Belgian called Father Joe, had seen it all before. As the bullets started to fizzle through the trees overhead, he lit another cigarette and went out in the garden for a stroll. Just kids, he said serenely. And he was right. Bunya was being overrun yet again by child soldiers. For months, we'd seen their blank, drugged eyes crowd round our car at roadblocks, weapons brandished like toys. Many of the kids reported, if that's the right word, to a warlord named Thomas Lubanga. Smooth and aloof, the besuited Mr. Lubanga sought to portray himself as a politician. When I went to see him at his fortified compound, his chief of protocol spoke in hushed terms about the President's schedule and then tried to stop us filming the bullet holes in the walls. Nine years later, and Mr. Lubanga has just earned the uncomfortable honour of of being the first person to be convicted by the International Criminal Court. He sat impassively as the verdict was read out in the Hague, still aloof, but now facing the prospect of decades in jail. Back in 2003, it was French troops who ended the fighting in Bunya. Now a foreign court is finally administering justice. Both events are a reminder that outside intervention can work in Africa. How, however imperfectly but they also underlined the failures of African leadership, how much better it would have been for everyone if the Congolese army had been able to stop the bloodshed and the Congolese justice system had put Mr. Lubanga and many more like him on trial. Perhaps that day will come. These are fickle, complicated times for Africa. The continent is changing fast, mostly for the better. Wars are ending even in Congo. Economies are booming. Democracy, or something like it, is spreading along with Chinese investment. There are still conflicts here and failed states and a persistent need for outside help. But many in Africa are seeking to renegotiate the terms of their relationship with the West. If you are the parent of a teenager, there's a fair chance he or she has come home from school in the past few days breathless with outrage about a Ugandan killer named Joseph Kony. For the past two decades, Mr. Kony has run what amounts to a terrorist cult. The Lord's Resistance army, the lra, are responsible for rape, torture, murder and the abduction of thousands of children. A group of American activists made a film about Mr. Kony, put it on the Internet and more than 100 million people have now clicked on it. In 2004, I spent a lot of time in northern Uganda tracking Kony's LRA and meeting their victims. I can still picture the dogs skipping off into the bush with their spoils at the scene of a massacre, 200 villagers hacked to pieces, their huts burned. A 13 year old boy called Innocent had lost his entire family. We took him to a local orphanage in a town called Lira. He stayed there for a year or so, but eventually ran away, determined to become a truck driver. Today, Lira is peaceful. In fact, Joseph Kony's forces have not been active inside Uganda at all for six years. The armies of several neighbouring states are now cooperating to try to finish off what's left of the lra. Just a few hundred fighters now in Uganda, former child soldiers are being rehabilitated. Communities reconciled progress. The American Internet film is not dishonest, but it shows none of this. It's outdated and simplistic, and many here find it deeply patronizing. It perpetuates the idea that Africans are helpless victims waiting for American college students to ride to their rescue. When the film was given a public screening in Lira this week, locals reacted with anger and disdain. I am still in touch with the orphanage where we left Innocent. The man in charge emailed to say we are at peace now. The film has brought back unwelcome memories. We are not happy with it. Help Us, by all means, he implied, but listen to us first.
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Narrator/Reporter
Andrew Harding, the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, this week delivered a strong warning on the need for further political reform. Without it, he told delegates at the end of the annual parliamentary session, China could again face the sort of political turmoil it went through during the Cultural Revolution. But as the session was going on in Beijing, Peter Day was in Inner Mongolia, finding out about one problem China's leaders did not hear much about.
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A huge statue of the mighty warrior Genghis Khan presides over Genghis Khan Plaza in Ordos New Town. The square is vast, fading into the snowy mist on a recent Sunday morning. Genghis Khan Plaza is flanked by huge and imposing buildings. Two giant horses from the steps rise on their hind legs in the center of the plaza, statues which dwarf the Great Khan himself. Only one element is missing from this vast ensemble. People, there are only two or three of us in this immense townscape, because this is Ordos, a place that's been called the largest ghost town in China. Most of the Newtown buildings are empty or unfinished. The ramp and apartment blocks are full of unsold flats. If you want to find a place where China's huge housing bubble has already burst, the then Ordos is the place to come. The story started about 20 years ago with the beginning of a great Mongolian coal rush. Private mining companies poured into the green inner Mongolian steppelands, pockmarking the landscape with enormous open cast holes in the ground or tunneling underground. Local farmers sold their land to the miners and became instantly rich. Jobs burgeoned, ceaseless coal truck convoys tear up the roads, and the old city of Ordos flourished. As the money flowed in, the municipality decided to think big too. It laid out plans for a huge new town for hundreds of thousands of residents, with Genghis Khan Plaza at the centre of it. Ten years later, Ordos New Town is now an empty new city. And it's merely the most spectacular example of a new Chinese phenomenon. In many cities, unsold flats, unlead shops, empty office blocks. It looks to outsiders as though the great Chinese building boom is over the real estate extravaganza that shook the world. Western financial experts, who fear a bursting of the Chinese real estate bubble, point out that the Chinese economy is now more dependent on house building than was the United States economy before the subprime lending bubble burst in 2007. In the eyes of the critics, China's housing boom is becoming a disaster. Well, the authorities in Beijing have taken notice of the direst warnings they've been taking official action to rein in the speculative buying of multiple apartments over the past two years. Chinese economic commentators seem much less concerned than the Western doom mongers. They are still confident that the technocrats in Beijing who've guided China's 30 years of spectacular economic growth will soon be able to balance supply and demand in the housing market. The same relaxed attitude was apparent in a couple I met in a spacious apartment in Ordos in the middle of a building site. They were buying the place as an investment, even though the delivery date keeps on slipping. It is of course only some 25 years since Chinese people were permitted to buy and sell homes at all. Decades of pent up demand are still being satisfied as the great wheel of Chinese urbanization continues to bring millions of people in from the countryside to work in the cities. Right now, there are other worries in the Chinese system, typified by Mr. Lee, a man I met in Ordos who'd prospered when the local council bought up the land on which his family's shop had been located. He invested the compensation with local private financiers. It's common practice in China where there's a big grey market in private loans to private businesses who can't get money from the big official state owned banks. Mr. Lee's private financier naturally invested the money in property and paid him interest every three months at the rate of about 40% a year. Mr. Lee had put the equivalent of about £700,000 into such schemes and for two years they paid out. But last year the interest payments began to dry up. Then one of the financiers disappeared. This has become a very familiar story in China now, one that's making big headlines as some famously rich private finance people come up for trial on charges of huge financial irregularity. At least half of Mr. Lee's money now seems to have disappeared. As a Mongolian, he told me he was very angry when it happened last year, but now his mood has changed to a curious fatalistic resignation. Quite unlike Genghis Khan. Once we were rich and now we're poor again, said Mr. Lee with something like a wry grin.
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Peter Day in China so who was it that came up with the theory of evolution due to natural selection? Charles Darwin, right? Well, yes and no. Another rather lesser known Briton also gets the credit and Alfred Russel Wallace. It was, however, Darwin's groundbreaking 1859 publication on the Origin of Species, which ensured that it's his name rather than that of Wallace, which is usually linked with that theory. Wallace traveled widely in Indonesia he identified what's become known as the Wallace Line. On one side, animals look like those in Australia. On the other, they are largely of Asian origin. Simon Worrell has been sailing in the wake of the great naturalist.
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Presenter
We heard you were coming and now we see it's true. The speaker's name is Tabitha, head woman of a village on the rugged west coast of Halmahera in Indonesia's fabled Spice Islands. As we clamber ashore from the Ombak Puti, a traditional Indonesian sailing vessel known as a penisi, almost the entire village has assembled under the mangrove trees to greet us. We'd set sail 10 days earlier from the port of Sorong on West Papua. At an arts and crafts shop, I find penis gourds for sale in the sweltering market. Papuan ladies the size of George Foreman sit behind mounds of banana, mango and jackfruit. When one of our party waggles her hips in time to the music blaring from a boombox, they erupt into gales of peace, pink gummed laughter. From Sorong, we sail to Waigao, the largest of the Raja Ampat Islands. Wallace landed here in 1859 in search of the creature that was his lifelong obsession, Paradisea rubra, the red bird of paradise. And at dawn, on a hilltop above the village of Savin Gray, we're treated to one of the high five moments of ornithology. A red bird of paradise strutting its stuff on a display tree like a disco dancer. Joseph Conrad called Wallace's classic work the Malay Archipelago his favorite bedside companion. In the muscular, unself involved prose typical of a Victorian, Wallace recounts a job like catalog of trials and tribulations. He is devoured by sand flies, tortured by mosquitoes. His flimsy boat is blown off course or wrecked. On coral reefs, his feet turn septic. On Waigao, he spent six weeks in a hut the size of a rabbit hutch, surviving on stewed cockatoo and pigeon sago and rice. Repeated bouts of malaria had left him weak and apathetic. He suffered from chronic headaches. He'd not seen England for five years. He never complains. Our days aboard the Ombud Putti drift by in a steady pulse of pleasure. We snorkel on coral reefs teeming with iridescent fish, explore Robinson Crusoe Islands dotted with nautilus shells. When dolphins appear, which happens almost daily, we race to the side of the boat to clap and cheer like football supporters. At night, we sleep on deck under the Southern Cross, waking to another peach coloured dawn and plates full of banana pancakes served by Mardi, our smiling Balinese steward. Now accompanied by a gaggle of men, women and children, we tramp up a forest path on Halmahera, looking for beetles. Homage to Wallace I fall in with an old man with roomy eyes. He gingerly lifts rocks and branches in case he disturbs a scorpion or snake. A small boy rushes up with a spider on a stick. It's yellow and black, the size of my hand and very venomous. I hold open my plastic specimen bag. Makassi, I say, patting the boar on the head. Thank you. Very nice. Back at the village, two men squat by a campfire, chopping up a wild boar. Its flesh is the color of bubblegum. The village consists of a few simple structures housing a handful of extended families. Tabitha explains that they are Christians. In 1999, she tells me, the village was attacked and set on fire by Islamic fundamentalists. Tabitha and the rest of the villagers fled to North Sulawesi, where they lived for eight years with other Christian refugees. They return to Halmahera five years ago and again live in relative peace with their Islamic neighbors. So far, our journey ends on the volcanic island of Ternate. We visit the house where Wallace lived when he wrote Charles Darwin his famous Letter from Ternate. In it, Wallace mapped out his own theory of evolution based on his field work in Indonesia. Great minds really do think alike. Today, Wallace is remembered mostly for the Wallace line, which divides Asiatic from Australian species. Strangely, for our celebrity obsessed culture, he was relieved not to be in the limelight. I could never have approached the completeness of his book, he said of Darwin's the Origin of Species. Its vast accumulation of evidence, its overwhelming argument and its admirable tone and spirit. I really feel thankful that it's not been left to me to give the theory to the world.
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Narrator/Reporter
Simon Worrell sailing in The Spice Islands 5 Oscars for the silent film the Artist have of course, been a tremendous boost for the French film industry. As President Sarkozy put it, a testament to the vitality of French cinema. Paris, in fact, was the birthplace of cinema, and even now it shows more films every day than anywhere else on earth. Coincidentally, another five Oscar winner at Hollywood this year was Martin Scorsese's children's film Hugo, which celebrates Paris and its cinemas. Joanna Robertson tells us that French children are in fact encouraged to appreciate what's termed Le Settieme Ha.
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Joanna Robertson
The seventh ought to be a narrow street, icy, damp winds up from the river seine. At number four, the great 17th century doors have been rolled back. A small cinema nestles within, behind a ticket and change sized window sits a woman swathed in oriental shawls, exchanging notes and coins for paper tickets, inspecting membership cards, tearing paper coupons from 10 Ticket Books. Above her, Greta Garbo gazes at Clark Gable, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn kiss. Barbara Stanwyck and James Mason drink cocktails together and Humphrey Bogart's Philip Marlowe lowers down. Inside the small auditorium, through a peephole window, the projectionist's head can just be glimpsed, a bobbing silhouette beneath the waiting audience read the newspapers. And this being the 4 o' clock showing, some have brought their goutet afternoon tea with them from the patisserie. Chocolate cake with pear and raspberry brioche with raisins and crystallised sugar. There's a contented air and a gentle crumpling of paper cake bags. The house lights dim in the dark a lion suddenly roars the familiar double roar and snarl of the MGM Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios lion. As his roar dies away, we find ourselves in Paris, our hearts, souls and imaginations in Paris 1895 La Belle Poc. Men in dress suits, brushed silk toppers, ladies in sparkling gowns and jewelled slippers, roses, gardenias, Maxims for dinner and dancing. It's so warm inside, this black and white Paris, so full of love, romance, music and champagne. Outside, in living colour. Paris, it's freezing cold. Evening darkens into night with a slip of silver crescent moon. At cinemas across the city, queues for 6pm showings are lengthening for film repertoire that spans a century at cinemas that do the same. It was just near here on 28 December 1895, during La Belle Epoque, that the Lumiere brothers held the first ever public film showing in in the Indian salon of the long since vanished Grand Cafe. Hundreds of cinemas have stood in the city since. Many of them remain independent or semi independent, some with almost legendary status. At one of these, Le Balzac, just off Le Champs Elysees, on a blue sky Sunday morning. Children are everywhere. The seats are crammed, the lights go down black and white. Dream Poetry from 1960s Soviet Georgia plays out across the wide screen. The characters speak not a word. All is silent but for Chopin, Szajkowski, Bizet and birdsong. As the applause dies away, a shy man, the man who made the films, Mikhail Kobakichi, rises from his seat. Banned from filmmaking for years by the Soviets, he managed to come to France in the 1990s. Like other foreign filmmakers in Paris, Copakiche, 30, found appreciation and support for his work as a child, he tells the children in Russian through a French interpreter, I watched only a very few films, but I watched them over and over and over again. Another man speaks. Michel Ocheleau, a French filmmaker revered for his beautiful animated films. As a child, he says, I drew, I painted, I cut out Ribon Belle paper chains to decorate our home. When I grew up, I had no money. I made my first film by cutting up paper cake bags and doilies hoarded from my local patisserie, into figures and scenes. Then I moved them, photographed them, one shot at a time, across the river Seine at Le Studio des Ursulines, where films have been shown since 1926, Florian Delaporte runs a cinema just for children. Well, as he puts it, from two years old and ever onwards, Florian also learned the art of film by going to the cinema and watching films over and over again. We peer down through the projectionist's window. A crowd of children have just watched a puppet film from the Czech Republic. Striding up and down before them is a young man, one of the filmmakers, gesticulating wildly, puppet in one hand, camera in the other. Un mouvement. He tweaks the puppet. Une photo. He clicks the camera. The excited children join in, bouncing up and down to the rhythm. Un movement. Une fauteu. Un movement. Une fauteu. They chant. Oui, says the breathless young man. Like that, we make a beautiful film.
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Narrator/Reporter
Joanna Robertson at the cinema in Paris, brings us to the closing credits. I'll be here again on Thursday and Saturday of next week with another cast of Correspondence from Far and Wide. Do join us. Goodbye.