← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
The News in 2039
00:28:06
Global despatches: will the African elephant be extinct in two decades? And which of...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC.
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This is from our own correspondent. You can hear the version of the programme we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our site at BBConline.
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But here's the latest edition broadcast on
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BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
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Hello. Where were you? 25 years ago, Tiananmen Square was in the headlines. The first free elections in the communist world. The funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini. And today, well, no shortage of news events now either. A new regime led by a former military man in Egypt, mounting discontent over the European Union. Russia flexing its muscles beyond its border. But which of these, if any, will continue to resonate? A quarter of a century on Life in China has changed dramatically in the years since June 1989. I was in Beijing back then as tanks prowled and soldiers fired on unarmed students and cleared the democracy protests which had been built building up in Tiananmen Square. The country has become a global economic power. Hundreds of millions have left the fields and joined the urban middle classes. But politics has atrophied and all challenges to the one party state are taboo. So do any vestiges remain of that youthful political idealism that brought crowds of protesters out onto the streets. Cary Gracie has been finding out.
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My hunt for China's young idealists, the inheritors of the tenement spirit, started with a three hour drive through Nile traffic. Ironically, the route took me first across the north end of Tiananmen Square under the gaze of Chairman Mao's portrait on the Gate of Heavenly Peace, then west along the Avenue of Eternal Tranquility, the very same route the tanks took in the opposite direction 25 years ago, rumbling into the heart of Beijing to kill both an untold number of young people and the idealism of a generation. These public spaces haven't changed much, but the Beijing beyond is unrecognisable from the one the students marched through a quarter century ago. No more mule carts, markets and teeming brick alleys. Beijing has supersized. It's now all six lane ring roads and high rise glass and concrete. The young idealists I was hunting had renounced city life and decamped to the countryside. After much to ing and froing on bumpy tracks, we finally stumbled upon a flaking sign proclaiming the Righteous Path Farm. Inside, I found the Righteous Path farmers full of enthusiasm. There was Zhu Chengcheng, born in the year of the Tiananmen protests. She said her parents had been optimists for political reform, but their generation had suffered. After June 4th when she got to 18 and told her parents she wanted to study politics in Beijing, they they said no politics, it's too dangerous. Instead they persuaded her to study international finance. But Zhu Chengcheng knew she had a calling. And when her peers left university to get trading jobs and to start saving for apartments and cars, she got involved instead in helping earthquake victims and running rural education projects. Matter of factly, she explained to me that young people with an education should think about society, that when individuals make an effort to help someone else, society changes. In 1989, any one of the young people in Tiananmen Square might have told you the same, but it sounds almost quaint nowadays. It's not overstating it by much to suggest that thinking about society is actively discouraged by government and parents alike. In the field behind Ju Chungchang, I came across a swarm of children in giggling under buckets of apples. Ducking into a Polytunnel, I met 29 year old Ji Zhi, who stood up from his strawberry plants and told me their seeds had been sent into space, the only link between his old life and his new one. Because until two years ago, this strawberry farmer was a designer of spacecraft and satellites. A career swerve, particularly mind bending in a nation of only children, with where sacrifice for an education and a white collar career is every family's mission statement. G.J. explained his move, saying there's more wisdom in nature than in science. He said turning to the ancient Eastern philosophy of cosmic harmony had made him freer than friends, sitting behind computers waiting for promotions. Holding this community of several dozen young idealists together was a rather bookish looking 26 year old. Wuyunlong shrugged off comparisons with Chairman Mao's fanatical commune movement, pointing out that everyone on the Righteous Path farm was there out of choice. The political philosophy is pragmatic, he said. Learn from what worked in communism and learn from what didn't, he told me. Some filled the vacuum left by the collapse of the old values with religion, others with shopping, computer games or Korean soap operas. But here, he said, the answer is organic farming. I wonder whether this was a political message in a country where air, soil and water are so heavily polluted, but everyone on the farm is careful to avoid criticizing the government. This is a big country, they say everything needs to be done cautiously. When I asked Wu Yulong directly about the spirit of the student protest 25 years ago, he said, back in 1989 they wanted freedom, democracy and equality, but their method was rebel rebellion and criticism. Our attitude, he said, is positive and practical. We're building a better society, not just condemning others. On the long journey back to the inscrutable glazed tower blocks of the capital, I reflected on the young idealists I'd met. Not everyone's answer to the future, possibly not even their own long term future perhaps. But they were likable, sincere. They looked me in the eye and they seemed happy, which made them stand out in a China where life often seems so insecure and where most people's experience seems an anxious struggle against daunting odds. The Righteous Path Farmers may be careful to pose no direct threat to China's rulers, but with their sustainable farming, their renunciation of consumerism and their sense of moral purpose, they do offer a quietly devastating indictment of the economic model and the values of that those rulers have enshrined.
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Cary Gracie in Beijing the West African state of Niger has experienced sustained political and economic crisis since it became independent from France in 1960. It's the world's least developed nation, but with the highest birth rate. Chronic food insecurity leaves millions of people with a constant struggle for survival. Although colonial rule lasted nearly six decades, the country experienced little development in that period. Fergal Keene has just returned from Niger and reflects on one of the more enduring legacies of its time. In French hands.
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The Governor sat in his office. I glimpsed him through the open doorway. A heavyset figure in crisp sand coloured uniform, a green beret on his head, a face that exuded authority and calm. The governor read his papers. He scribbled a note. Men came and went, speaking briefly to him in the hallway. Some women waited. One carried a very young baby from whose stomach protruded a large growth. Another wanted the governor to arrange for her to travel to the capital so that her kidney troubles could be treated. In Agadez, Governor Garba is a man of great power and people make their way to the door of his office in the hope that he'll intercede to rescue them from the accumulated afflictions of life in the world's least developed nation. We had come to pay our respects, to acknowledge his position and to ensure we wouldn't face obstructions, official or otherwise, in our work. Waiting there in the stifling heat of midday, the light a glare of blinding white outside. I suddenly felt faint and had to sit down. Waiting for my composure to return, my eyes wandered to the wall opposite. There was fixed a a long black board. On it were the names of all the governors of Agadez from the French colonial period to the present day. The very first was a Lieutenant Jah, who arrived here in 1904. With him came the beginnings of organized bureaucracy, of list making and strictly demarcated boundaries of centralized power. His first task was to carry out a census, so the chiefs of the Tuareg nomad tribes were summoned to his presence. The Sultan of Agadez, hitherto the most powerful of men, was told to come to the French camp. He sent an impostor who was welcomed with full military honors. But when Lieutenant Jean discovered the truth, he aimed his cannon at the Sultan's palace and told him to present himself at once or face destruction. The sultan complied. In his account to the colonial authorities, the lieutenant wrote of the Tuareg chiefs, they always answer enthusiastically at the beginning of the conversation, but when the questions are lengthy, they yawn and stop paying attention. Jean described the census as a weapon of control. The Tuareg masters of the desert would be reduced to mere administrative details. Each and every one of them could be made aware of the fact that he was caught fast in the web of our investigations by us saying to him, you are from such and such a tribe, such and such a family. These are the names of your chiefs, your parents, your campgrounds. A campaign to reduce Tuareg income from the camel caravan trade across the Sahara cut earnings by 60% and helped to contribute to famine. In 1913, a war that lasted 40 months saw Agadez besieged. And for a brief period, the people of the desert became entangled in the colonial power games of the Great War. The French left in 1960. There's little of their presence in Agadez now, save the language. And this only among the educated urban population. And of course, the uranium mines on which French nuclear power is based, farther to the north, in Arlet. And also the bureaucracy. This building in which I now sat represented an enduring legacy of colonialism. The empire of the paper pushers, the list makers, the line drawers, the tax collectors, the centralizers, all backed up by the gun. I was rousted from my speculations by a stir at the door of the governor's office. He emerged flanked by his aide and several supplicants. We joined the small group. Ah, the BBC. He smiled. We briefly outlined our filming plans. He smiled again, shook hands and seemed happy. And then he went on his way to prayers. Soon afterwards, a couple of hours was all it took. We discovered the limits of the governor's co operation when we went to film trafficked migrants at a jail. No cameras, we were told. And thus began a saga of letters back and forth between a helpful government minister in the capital. Ourselves and the governor, to paraphrase our papers were not in order. We believed they were. The governor believed they were not. My colleagues went to visit him again. He delivered a lecture on the need for papers to be in order. I hope you have learned your lesson, he said. They nodded, knowing that dissent was pointless. And that lesson that out here, far from the capital, the temporal power that divines what can and what cannot be is Governor Garba. Yes, that was a lesson well and truly learned.
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Fergal Keen in Niger. And that's twice we've been to Agadez in two weeks. Could be some time before we're there again. Now. The state of Kashmir has been partitioned between India and Pakistan for nearly 70 years, and no one, it seems, is happy about it. India believes it's Indian. Pakistan maintains it should be Pakistani. Many of the Kashmiris themselves say it should be independent. Failure to reach diplomatic agreement on the status of the territory has brought India and Pakistan to war on a number of occasions. It also resulted in an insurgency which continued unchecked for decades. It was in the grip of this separatist violence when Andrew Whitehead first reported from there for the BBC in the 1990s. He's been back regularly, but his latest visit was his first for several years. So we wondered what's changed and what hasn't over the period he's known the Kashmir Valley.
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The flight into Kashmir was full of Indian tourists, every seat taken and an air of holiday excitement. What a change from 20 years ago. Then, amid the separatist insurgency and equally brutal Indian army response, no one took the plane to Srinagar for pleasure. This time I came across scores of holidaymakers strolling beside Dal Lake and visiting the beauty spots. At a shop on Polo View, I queued behind a family from Delhi who spent seven thousand rupees seventy pounds on Kashmiri walnuts and almonds to take home with them. The number of Indian tourists there are far fewer. Foreigners has been edging up year by year as the violence has eased so much so I heard tell, there's been an appeal for Kashmiris to offer home stays because of a shortage of rooms in hotels and on houseboats. In the 90s, even if there had been any Indian holiday makers, they would never have felt at ease in a Kashmiri home. On my drive in from the airport, I spotted another sign of Kashmir's bounce back huge mansions being built on the outskirts of Srinagar. The place has always had more of an air of prosperity than many North Indian cities, and while there's certainly poverty and deprivation. Some Kashmiris are now doing very well indeed. And not just in the city. At a saffron growing village just outside Srinagar, every house was lavishly appointed, sprawling two or three storeys. Not the sort of opulence I'd expected in rural Kashmir. And security? Well, what was once one of the most militarized spots on earth is now much more lightly guarded. There are bunkers and checkpoints, but many fewer than in the 90s. In Srinagar at least. I walked round the city at close of day with a colleague who spent many years in Pakistan. We browsed at the paper stalls, said hello to the women selling fish on one of the bridges and chatted to a teenager as we walked along the banks of the Jhelum River. He was astonished. Srinagar today, he said, felt safer than Islamabad or any other Pakistani city. But it would be wrong to imagine that Kashmir has found peace. The numbers killed in the troubles amount to perhaps one in 50 of the valley's adult population, a huge proportion when set aside, say Northern Ireland or Sri Lanka. It's still a society in trauma. A Kashmiri who was a teenager when the armed separatism erupted said that in some areas, perhaps half the young men came to be embroiled in some manner in the militancy. A younger, upper class Kashmiri told me how his parents had sent him out of the valley to a boarding school because it was safer. The other kids there, Punjab is mainly nickname me AK47, he said with a thin, resentful smile. He supports continued Indian rule. He's in a minority. One Kashmiri intellectual whose opinion I respect, ventured that for every Kashmiri who backs India, there are three who favor Pakistan and that both these camps are outnumbered by supporters of Kashmir's independence. Young Kashmiris may not be taking up guns, but the killing of scores of stone throwing but otherwise unarmed anti India demonstrators by the security forces in the summer of 2010 reforged a burning sense of resentment. I went to a new university, the Islamic University of Science and Technology. Both faculty and students told me there was nothing Islamic about it beyond the name. Students there, men and women alike, explained in calm and considered tones why the ebbing of the militancy doesn't mean that Kashmiris feel any more Indian, why they remain unreconciled to Indian rule. On my initial visits to Kashmir all those years ago, I used to see quite a bit of a bookish young man called Uma Farooq. He was then in his early 20s and had recently assumed the role on his father's assassination of Srinagar's Muslim chief priest. He was a leading separatist. He still is. I called again at his home near Nagin Lake. The years have been kind to him, kinder than they've been to the cause he champions. The reduced level of violence was no bad thing, he said. But if the armed militancy hadn't worked, neither had India's military presence. The young were even more alienated today, and the mood of resistance was still very strong. So much has changed in Kashmir. So much remains the same.
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And that's Andrew Whitehead. Conservationists are suggesting the very future of the African elephant, the largest land animal on earth, could now be at risk because of the lucrative illegal trade in ivory. It's estimated that more than 30,000 elephants are being killed every year in Africa, where enforcement and wildlife protection officials face a continuing and sometimes deadly battle against poachers. The filmmaker Natasha Breed, who lives in Kenya, has been telling us how one particularly well known elephant called mountain bull fell victim to the poachers years ago
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while walking with a camel train in northern Kenya. I remember coming across the bleached white dome of an elephant's skull. Within the smooth hollows of both its eye sockets were bunches of dried grass, fluffy with seed, arranged with evident care. A camel herder told me it was customary among his people, on passing the skull of an elephant to pay respect to the fallen giant in this way. In those days, you rarely saw the skull or bones of an elephant. There's a legend that elephants have graveyards where they go to die, but science has never proved this. It's true that they will, on finding the skeleton of an elephant, stop and examine it, touch it, sometimes even pick up a bone or a tusk and carry it off. I once sat and watched with tears in my eyes as a family of elephants returned to where they'd had to abandon a calf which had been too weak to stand or to follow them. It had since died. And the tenderness and sorrow that emanated from that desolate little huddle of elephants as they gently explored the lifeless grey body with their sensitive trunks was one of the most moving scenes I've ever witnessed. Nowadays, it seems north Kenya is littered with the carcasses of elephants poaching. And the relentless ivory trade is laying waste to Africa's elephant populations. Kim Eli Maripet is an elephant researcher monitoring their movements across Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, the Ngarindari Forest and Mount Kenya, where for centuries elephants have followed the same migratory patterns. A network of Conservation organizations working alongside Kenya Wildlife Service equip foot and vehicle patrols to monitor the vast expanse of northern Kenya. State of the art GPS telemetry keeps track of certain radio collared individuals as they follow the time worn routes pioneered by generations of elephants whose own bones have long since turned to dust. It was Kim Elli who was detailed to go looking for Mountain Bull. Mountain Bull wore one of the broad leather collars and satellite transmitters. His daily movements monitored on the researchers computer screens. He had earned his name from being one of the most determined elephant bulls in the area when it came to overcoming obstacles in the way of his chosen path, following his ancestors footsteps to Mount Kenya. Even electric fences didn't deter these bulls. They showed great persistence in finding a way up to the forests and moorlands. Bulldozing the odd farm fence along the way they crop braided with impunity as they went. This eventually led to the construction of a purpose built elephant corridor that crosses beneath a major road with heavy traffic allowing the elephants to take a safe route away from farmland up to their mountain refuge. But for several days the signal emitted by Mountain Bull's collar hadn't moved. It happens sometimes. Only a week before, another elephant signal had remained static for a few days on computer screens and a search party was mounted. That collar was found torn and lying on the ground still sending its signal up to space and the elephant was soon spotted nearby unharmed. That's what you always hope is the case, Kimmeli said. Collars do sometimes break and drop off necessitating the elephant being tranquilized again to have a new one fitted. So armed with a satellite receiver and coordinates of mount and bull's GPS signal, Kimeli and a scout from the Mount Kenya Trust set off to look for him. After two days they came across the tracks of an elephant which appeared to have stood still for a long while before heading falteringly into a thicket of bamboo. Mountain Bull was lying on his side with a deep spear wound in his back. Triggered by his weight on some sort of a tripwire. A spear strategically positioned in an overhead branch must have dropped and lodged in the elephant's spine. He was dead and his tusks had been hacked from his face. It was heartbreaking hearing Kamili's account of how the elephant had met his fate. No doubt the poachers had waited nearby and once the bull toppled onto his side wasted no time in drawing out their machetes and hacking out his beautiful creamy tusks. Had the elephant even drawn his last breath? I wondered. I recalled the grasses in the skull of that elephant years ago, and asked Kemelli if he knew of the custom. Oh, yes, he said, it's our way of saying, sleep tight, comrade.
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And that was Natasha breed. Well, 25 years ago, while I was in Tiananmen Square in Beijing reporting on the massacre, my colleagues were busy as ever elsewhere. Alex Brodie, now, incidentally brewing beer in the Lake District, was telling this program about the funeral of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran. No matter how much they want to, he wrote then, few of his enemies believe the Ayatollah's revolution will crumble. Another Kevin Connolly in Cairo this weekend, was in Poland in 1989, reporting on the communist world's first tentative step towards democracy and wondering where would it all
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lead in the end? Egypt's presidential election wasn't exactly a cliffhanger. Everyone expected the loser, Hamdeen Sabahi, to lose, which he duly did, acting all along like some kind of state appointed runner up. The winner, Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, could never quite compose his features into a winning smile. His election posters look like evidence collected to support a charge of attempted geniality. And sometimes you're reporting one story when a better story happens somewhere else, leaving you feeling like an ostler caught selling a horse and cart on the day the motor car came to town. So it didn't help that the European Union elections, held at more or less the same time, produced that sharp spike in support for insurgent or anti establishment parties. And in the middle of it all, overshadowed by it all, came news of the death of Wojciech Yarozelski, a key figure in the first foreign election I ever covered in the Communist Poland of 1989. It was my first lesson in how hard it is to judge which events have lasting importance and. And which do not. Yaruzelski was an ambiguous figure. Many hated him for imposing martial law on his own country. Others argued that by doing so, he prevented the Soviet Union from doing to Poland in the 1980s what it had done to Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and Hungary in the 1950s. After long talks with the independent trades union Solidarity, Yarozelski agreed to what would be the first free elections in the history of the communist world. By coincidence, they were exactly 25 years ago, in the June of 1989. He was still a Communist, so the election was still a fiddle, with two thirds of the seats in the lower houses of Parliament reserved for party candidates. But there would be a free vote for an upper chamber, a chink of light in the suffocating darkness of totalitarianism, Solidarity campaigned carefully. One poster showed two young children curled up asleep above a slogan that said simply, so that tomorrow they will be proud. The message, voting for freedom might not bring freedom from poverty for a generation. But Poland suddenly crackled with vitality, as though water was running through irrigation channels that had been dry for decades. I can remember a huge meeting of miners coming off shift at a deep pit in Upper Silesia and standing as they sang a hymn with extraordinary gentleness, their eyes bright white in coal black faces. And yet, when the great day came, it was all a little overshadowed. That first news weekend of June in 1989 was one of the busiest for years. We were still using a telex machine in our office in Warsaw back then, a sort of combination of typewriter, telegraph machine and upright piano that spewed the news out in long, easily broken coils of ticker tape. It looked like it belonged in the railway station at Dodge City, clattering out a warning that the iron horse was late. That weekend it brought us news of the terrible events in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where the Communists in China followed a path that Poland had avoided. Then there was the extraordinary outpouring of grief at the grimly chaotic funeral of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. And finally, heartbreaking word of an astonishingly destructive train disaster near Ufa in Russia, in which 600 lives were lost when two trainloads of children were consumed in a gas explosion. The news from Poland was reported, of course, but not as extensively as it might have been. All those events mattered enormously, of course. The Ayatollah helped shape the modern world, and so did the events of Tiananmen Square. Even the railway disaster helped the Soviet people to recognize the dangerous decay of their clapped out superpower. But from that Polish election, enormous changes continue to flow. When it was done, Solidarity won 99 of the hundred seats available, losing only where a canny independent candidate raffled a tractor. In parallel with the voting process, the collapse of communism became inevitable, and that meant more freedom for more people and the new patterns of migration to which we're still adjusting. It changed the political landscape around Russia, too, and helps to explain how it views the current crisis in Ukraine. So the manner of Abdel Fattah El Sisi's coming to power may have lacked dramatic tension, and for the moment, we cannot judge if he will influence the turbulent course of events in Egypt or be swept away by them. But it might all start to become a bit clearer in another 25 years
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or so, and that'll be in about 2039. But I'm sure we'll still be here to tell you all about it. Kevin Connolly bringing today's edition to a close.