← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
The President's Golden Scissors
00:27:40
Correspondents' stories: behind the scenes at the UN General Assembly in New York - so...
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- [00:00]
Kate Adie
You're about to hear BBC Radio 4's
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Andrew Harding
From Our Own correspondent. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Nick Bryant
Hello. Today, an historic week at the UN General assembly in New York and why some of those headlines were about events which never happened. Hool controlled the water flowing down from the high peaks of the Alps in Austria. The hills are alive with the sound of disagreement. We find out what's on the menu at the early morning circumcision parties in Tajikistan and head for a deserted war memorial in Montenegro on the trail of Europe's most notorious diamond thieves. But first to Kenya, where senior security officials have been summoned to appear before the Parliamentary Defence Committee on Monday. This follows the attack by members of the Al Shabaab group on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi in which at least 67 people were killed. The chairman of the Defence Committee said the time for responsibility and accountability had come. Andrew Harding, who was with the BBC team providing coverage of the siege, says an attack by the Somali based militants had not been unexpected.
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Andrew Harding
A few months ago, I was sitting in Dr. Yassin Nur's kitchen above his private hospital in Mogadishu. Some wounded soldiers had just been brought into the Somali capital, the survivors of a massive roadside bomb that had gone off on the outskirts of the city. Dr. Nur, a short, talkative man, was taking a break from surgery, sipping tea and telling me a chilling story about about a young relative, a 19 year old who had recently arrived on his doorstep unannounced. The young man had grown up in exile in Germany, so many families have fled abroad to escape Somalia's endless anarchy. But as Dr. Nur put it, the boy had spent too much time in front of his computer reading about jihad. And so he'd come back without even a suitcase to join Al Shabaab, the Islamist militants who claimed responsibility for the horrors in Nairobi. He spent a night here, said the doctor. He barely spoke. Then he vanished. He called us just once to say he was now married and preparing to fight the infidel. If you're flying from Mogadishu to Nairobi, the security checks are slow and thorough. All planes make an extra stop in northern Kenya just to search the passengers one more time. But it's easy enough to drive through the bush, bribe any policeman you stumble across and vanish into the dusty streets of Eastleigh, the chaotic thriving Somali neighbourhood on the edge of Nairob. I used to live in the Kenyan capital just over the hill from Eastleigh. That was 10 years ago, before the Chinese had started building their giant highways that are slowly unblocking the city's traffic choked streets. Nairobi is changing fast. New shopping centres, rooftop bars serving sushi and ludicrously high rents. But it's a place, like much of Africa, that tends to be seen by foreigners in extreme terms. Kenya's either a beach and safari paradise or somewhere forever teetering on the edge of machete wheels wielding chaos. The truth, of course, is more prosaic. This is a compassionate, chaotic, occasionally violent, exceptionally tolerant nation. A country that's absorbed vast numbers of refugees over the years with barely a shrug. But two years ago, Kenya's patience with Somalia finally snapped and it sent troops across the border, hoping to create a buffer zone of stability. Al Shabaab immediately and repeatedly promised to respond with exactly the sort of carnage that that finally engulfed Nairobi's Westgate Mall. The details of the attack and of the attackers are still being sifted from the ruins. Was the British widow Samantha Lewthwaite involved? Was this a Somali revenge operation or part of a much broader global Al Qaeda agenda? It was certainly well planned. You'll have heard the stories of methodical evil, of children shot at point blank range, of grenades tossed into blood drenched rooms. And you may have seen the pictures of startling selfless courage, of unarmed men running into danger again and again to coax families literally paralyzed with fear, to race to safety. Nairobi has always felt like a small town. Almost everyone I know here has lost a friend or had a narrow escape or has some other visceral personal connection to the horrors of Westgate. Yusuf Hassan lives just down the road from the mall. He's still in a wheelchair after a grenade was thrown at him last year, possibly by a member of Al Shabaab. Yusuf is a Somali Kenyan and a member of Parliament. We always go to Westgate on Saturday morning, he told me. But by chance, not this time. Even after the grenade attack, I felt safe in this city. But that's changed completely now. Yusuf feels the Westgate attack has pulled Kenya closer together, united it in grief and outrage. And he, he thinks that will last. But in Parliament, they're already asking tough questions about why the security services took hours to respond properly to the attack, about corruption and infighting in the intelligence services, and about how Kenya's army should fight back, should it allow itself to be dragged even deeper into the war in Somalia. I've not been able to reach Dr. Nur this week. His phone isn't being answered and. But I imagine him at his clinic in Mogadishu, waiting for whatever the ambulance brings next and wondering if his young relative will ever call again.
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Nick Bryant
Andrew Harding in Nairobi. It's been a busy news week in and around the United Nations General assembly in New York. Not just that historic chat on the phone between the American and Iranian presidents, but also a resolution setting out a plan of action for the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons. There was talk of revving up the latest Middle east peace process, and concerns were expressed over mounting disorder in Sudan and in Kashmir. Our Nick Bryant's covering his first General assembly and soon discovered it's not just about those keynote speeches being delivered inside the assembly hall.
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Pity pour Burkina Faso, I thought, on the opening morning of the General assembly, as presidents, prime ministers, foreign secretaries and their minions headed through the streets and avenues of Turtle Bay, the riverside home of the United Nations. At these kind of gatherings, the length of your motorcade is always a measure of your power. And while Barack Obama turned up with his usual convoy of motorcycle outriders, black limousines, communications vehicles and an ambulance, all tiny Burkina Faso got for an escort was a New York Police Department scooter. Short of the NYPD providing a golf cart or tandem, it's hard to imagine more of a vehicular slight. This is the week in the calendar when a more egalitarian spirit is supposed to reign at the un, when the president of the United States is allotted no more speaking time than the vice President of the Seychelles 15 minutes of potential geopolitical fame. But Barack Obama didn't pay much attention to that. He spoke for 40, another example of American exceptionalism, and nor does anyone else. Instead, the usual global rankings assert themselves, whether quantified by the size of your security detail or the attention you receive in the media center. Since this is my inaugural General Assembly, I'm something of a freshman, so a few first impressions. To begin with, the security has a uniquely Big Apple flavour. The NYPD floods the area with so many officers that they bring their own doughnut and coffee vans. Those security arrangements, as any New Yorker will tell you, are a major inconvenience. Especially cruel was the police officer I saw who stopped a woman reaching her dentist. Or perhaps he was doing her a favor. Some would say listening to over 130 world leaders pontificating on the global issues of the day is akin to pulling teeth. I found that the normal rules of diplomatic reportage apply. It's not just the case of covering what's said, but also of listening for what goes unsaid. This year, for instance, President Obama didn't threaten Iran with new sanctions or possible military action. Nor did the new Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, threaten Israel. Neither is it simply a case of reporting what happens inside the assembly hall. You have to train a closer eye on the meetings on the margins. Diplomats love their bilaterals, those face to face pow wows where the real work is done. And often the headline comes from things that didn't happen at all. The possibility of a handshake between Barack Obama and Hassan Rouhani created a real frisson. Not since the Iranian hostage crisis have the leaders of these two countries come face to face. But as the VIPs assembled for the luncheon at which this brief encounter was supposed to take place, the Iranians didn't show. It was rather like waiting to see if a bride would turn up for her wedding, but with the American President cast as the jilted husband. Alas, we didn't get to witness this piece of diplomatic theatre. Although the week did end with that historic phone call when Mr. Rouhani was on his way to the airport. So for entertainment, many people's gaze turned to a rival show in town, the Clinton Global Initiative. Organized by the former US president. Its stage looks like an Oprah style talk show. Its armchairs accommodate celebrities like Bono. Even President Obama dropped in for a chat with his predecessor. It's not as if the Clintons are gatecrashing the party. They've created a competing party of their own. And up against the rather staid proceedings of the General assembly, it feels like a late night rave. New York is a city where you always feel there's somewhere cooler and trendier to be. And the Clinton Global Initiative exploits that sense of paranoia. That's not to belittle what happens at Unger, as it's known in this acronym addicted organisation. Meaningful work is done this week on Iran and Syria. It has the potential to be momentous, but often the speeches themselves feel like diplomatic Muzak background noise while progress is made in private. As the sun dips behind the wondrous Chrysler Building, I'm watching another motorcade drive through the gates. A limousine sandwiched between two NYPD squad cars and accompanied by a black station wagon with marksmen leaning out of the windows. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say it's a middle ranking delegation like Thailand. That or Burkina Faso has just been given a major upgrade.
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Nick Bryant at the UN in New York. Police in France are continuing to hunt those responsible for a spate of high profile jewellery thefts which took place over the summer along the Mediterranean coast. They're believed to be the work of a criminal gang known as the Pink Panthers. Many of whom are said to come from the Balkans. They're thought to have stolen watches and precious stones worth more than 200 million pounds. And detectives aren't the only ones who've been trying to track them down. Havana Marking has been making a film about the Panthers. She too wanted an interview.
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Havana Marking
I knew tracking down the Pink Panthers would be difficult. I also knew that it was highly unlikely they would want to talk to me even if I did find them. Why would they, when Interpol has a working group dedicated to their demise? In fact, more than 180have already been arrested, some on the job, some crossing borders and some back home in the Balkans. But I've learnt that it's best not to predict people's reactions. People talk, or not, for reasons you can't possibly imagine, until you meet them. And so, when the first meeting was finally arranged, I didn't stop to question it. I did pause, however, when I was told I had to travel alone in a local taxi to a deserted war memorial on the outskirts of Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. I wasn't allowed to take a mobile phone. I didn't know who I was meeting. It was ok, I was told. They were not a violent gang. That is not how they work. And at the time, I reasoned, while the robberies were violent, forced entries, no one had been shot or seriously hurt in any one of the 150 jobs they had done. When I got to the memorial, I thought immediately, what a good place for a meeting. It was private, discreet, hidden by trees. But as I waited, I began to get nervous. It was also a good spot for a drug deal, a heist, a murder. Slowly, a beaten up old blue Persia estate pulled up alongside me. Please excuse my car, said a man in perfect English. We like to travel quietly down here. This turned out to be Novak, a tall man in his 50s, wearing white trousers, a pink polo shirt and with a gold tooth. He explained he was an electrics and alarm specialist for the Pink Panthers. He'd been looking forward to meeting me. He said he loved journalists. He had been a local fixer for newspaper reporters during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. His main client, and he'd clearly had a crush on her, had been a young female writer from one of the UK Sunday papers. You remind me of her, he said. Who could have predicted that meeting? Novak opened doors and before long, I met Mike and Layla. Not their real names. Both had been involved in robberies in mainland Europe. Mike was an expert safecracker. I can crack them all, he bragged. And Layla A scout, the one who cases the joint before the raid. What were their reasons for meeting me? For Mike, it was ego, I'm sure. He was a professional thief, and when a New Yorker article had declared the gang the world's most successful diamond thieves, it was like receiving an award. We are all human beings, after all. I'd like to win an Oscar. Mike, with his classic Mediterranean machismo, wanted to be a film star. And Layla? She had joined the gang at 17 because she fell in love with a ringleader. But she said the stress had caused her soul to collapse inside. She hated all the transformations she had to undergo. Beauticians and hairdressers would come to her flat and change her appearance to match her fool's documents. She felt like a doll, she said, who was being experimented on. And she hated repeatedly losing her identity. She tried to get her boyfriend to leave and live what she called a normal life, but to no avail. It became clear she had had a breakdown. It occurred to me that this interview had become a therapy session, that there was no one else she could talk to about it. Three people, all with very different reasons to talk. And after various meetings over a period of months, they agreed to be recorded. Things were delayed when, happily, I discovered I was pregnant. By the time I went out to do my final interviews, I was eight months gone, enormous, and hardly able to stay awake in the hot night clubs and bars that seemed to be the homes of Balkan gangsters. And while you can never predict people's reasons for talking, you also can't predict people's reactions to a pregnancy. Suddenly, Layla was checking I had taken my vitamins and asked me back to her home. The macho Mike was discussing his wife's pregnancies and labours. Once a gangster discusses his children, he also reveals his paranoias and fears, and even his Valium addictions. I didn't get a chance to meet Novak again. Not long after our talk, he was arrested and is still helping the police with their inquiries.
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Nick Bryant
And that's Havana marking. A new great game is underway in the mountainous, energy rich countries of Central Asia. This month, China's President Xi Jinping went on his first tour of the region, signing deals worth billions of pounds in former Soviet states which have historically come under Moscow's influence. Not only does Beijing bring great economic power to the table, but it's also less queasy about the autocrat democratic style of the leaders with whom it has to do business. From time to time they do come up for election, but there's never any real doubt about the outcome. In a few weeks, the leader of the poorest Central Asian country, Tajikistan, which shares a border with both China and Afghanistan, will attempt to extend his 21 year rule as head of state. And as James Kumar Samy's been finding out, he can boast of some sizable achievements.
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James Kumarasamy
For Emmamali Rahmon, size matters. A few years ago, Tajikistan's long serving president decided that his then surname, Rakhmonov, was a bit too long, a bit too Slavic. So in an act of linguistic self mutilation, he lopped off the of reverting to the more authentically Central Asian Rahmon. Since shrinking his name for patriotically political reasons, the man who's run this mountainous Central Asian state, rather than virtually unchallenged since 1992, has been thinking big. Very big. The capital, Dushanbe, a place where just 10% of apartments have central heating, is experiencing a municipal building boom on a grand scale. Near the modest Komsomal Park, a place of simple pleasures from playing snooker to eating shashlik, workers are constructing the biggest tea house in the world. No corner cafe serving something strong and brown in a cracked green cup, this Central Asian choihona, a place for talking philosophy and business, looms over the city with its light blue domes like a cathedral of chai. Inquisitive foreign journalists are kept away, but previous visitors have been shown what lies behind the sweeping staircase visible from the road, rooms with ornately carved wooden panels designed for the president himself. Inside them he'll enjoy such local delights as spicy meat dumplings called mantea and plov, the rice, meat and vegetable dish wolfed down at Tajik weddings, funerals and early morning circumcision parties which tea houses host. The new building was supposed to get a presidential snip earlier this month, as state TV meticulously documents the Tajik leader loves cutting ceremonial ribbons, and he was due to open the teahouse on Independence Day. But the work isn't yet finished, so the golden scissors, which Tajik's joke President Rahmon carries everywhere, haven't had their planned public outing. They did have one last year, though, not far away, when the president opened another palatial pet project, a huge grey building shaped like an open book whose source of funding remains, like so much in this country, closed. It is the biggest library in Central Asia, an imposing nine story edifice ringed with busts of turban wearing writers from Tajik history. Inside, giant chandeliers dangle over a temple of echoey opulence whose Corridors are unnecessarily wide and whose books are a bit of an afterthought. In fact, they seem in rather short supply, as I discovered when I was taken on a short tour by a nervous security guard. As we darted from room to room filled with poorly stocked shelves, he insisted, unconvincingly, that quality, not quantity, was what mattered. Every one of the rather shabby volumes on display, he maintained, was a rare first edition. Unique. The institution is unique, but in a different way. For this isn't a library you borrow from, it is one you lend to. Tajiks have been forced to contribute their own books to fill the shelves. The few new volumes I did notice had one thing in common, a picture of the President on their cover. His face is straight out of post Soviet central casting, jowly and well fed, daubed with a pair of dark, bushy eyebrows and topped with a slightly raised, slightly brill, creamed and more than slightly receding hairline. It is a face you see a lot here. Drive out of Dushanbey, dodging the jaywalkers who drift nonchalantly across its wide avenues. And it's hard to avoid posters of President Rahmon. In one, he proudly clutches a bunch of crimson grapes. In another, he's embraced by grateful villagers. Accompanying the images are pearls of presidential philosophy, such as there is unity in being unified. It all reaches a patriotic crescendo in the other recent record breaking addition to the Dushanbe skyline. The world's tallest flagpole, 165 metres tall. It is topped by a huge red, white and green Tajik flag, which, so the rumours go, was trimmed from its original football pitch size because it was too heavy to flutter. Even now it needs a healthy breeze to do more than hang limply down. Ordinary Tajiks seem, in public at least, to enjoy a certain reflected vanity from this presidential building spree, even though its economic benefits flow not to the Tajik people, but to the People's Republic of China. Chinese firms have the contracts and they're bringing in Chinese workers to do the jobs, partly because there are so few Tajik men still in the country. An estimated 1 million of them work in Russia, sending home remittances that make up a world beating 47% of the country's GDP. That's one record which Tajikistan's ribbon cutting president is not about to celebrate.
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Nick Bryant
James Kumarasamy, back now from Dushanbe. Think of the Alpine landscape and what images spring to mind. Heidi gambolling in the meadows, skiing crystalline mountain streams, running through fields of edelweiss and violets. Water, of course, is at the heart of that landscape, whether it's keeping those mountain pastures green in summer or covering them in a thick layer of snow and ice during the winter. Yet it's even more crucial than that, because today it's also the backbone of most Alpine nations power supply. In Austria, more than 60% of the country's electricity is generated by hydropower. And now there are plans to expand the network of dams and reservoirs even further. But Nick Thorp in the High Tyrol has been finding out there's vigorous debate over the plans to control the water in the region. And the locals are wondering, will their voices be drowned out?
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Kate Adie
I felt the cool rising from the brook, said Erika Holzknecht, even during the hottest days of summer whenever I cycled to Langenfeld. As a farmer tending her cattle in one of the highest farms in Austria, 2000 metres above sea level, she has a delicate relationship with the fragile climate of the planet. At her feet, the Venterbruck is fed by a million streams and trickles by melting glaciers and sudden squalls of rain. And like its twin, the Gorgel, it wrestles its waters down into the Othaler river, which cascades down the Alps into the Inn, then the Danube, then the Black Sea, far away to the southeast. This has been a good year in the mountains, Erika explains. A snow rich winter, then a cool spring which kept the glaciers painted white and beautiful. Followed by a hot summer which encouraged the grass in the Alpine meadows. As we speak, herds of clouds disperse across a deep blue sky, like football fans going home after a match. There are no trees so high up. The mountains are dark green, mottled with the shadows of the clouds, their highest peaks dusted with snow. But deeper shadows hang over these mountains. Plans to extend an existing hydro project and divert 80% of these waters into a new reservoir 180 metres tall and 500 metres across. In the face of opposition from local farmers and tourist companies, the people at the electricity company have taken their argument to Brussels. We are the solution to global warming, they say. Switch off your soot pumping, coal guzzling giants, your sinister, expensive, accident prone nuclear power plants and take a sip of this clean energy from the sparkling mineral waters of the Alps. But the same unusual heat from the sun, which increased the winter fodder supply for Erika's farm, is melting Austria's glaciers. You used to be able to ski on them, even in summer. Now that is a tale for the grandchildren, the farmers of the Erdstal Valley. Are fighting a rearguard action to stop the diversion of their remaining waters. You cannot dance at two weddings, says Franz Reich, another local farmer, meaning either the Tyrol power generator Tivag will get the water or the locals will keep it. And the power company narrative that there's enough water up here for everyone is false. I walk in the Placertal, where the new reservoir is planned with Claudia Mitterdorfer, a botanist and preparer of creams and lotions from wild plants. The summer flowers are gone. She identifies them, mostly from their arnica, montana, aconite, saxifrage, gentian, reindeer, moss, rock jasmine, and milkveg. I've joined a pilgrimage of environmentalists to this place to hear the arguments against the dam far below us in Innsbruck, the representative of the power company was upset that he had not been invited to put his case. But today, at least, the mountains are in the protesters hands. We're not against power generation, of course, says another farmer, Reinhard Scheibe. We have milking machines for our cows and generators to pump artificial snow in winter to prolong the skiing season. But the winning of hydropower must be done in harmony with nature, he says. Certain valleys cannot be asked to sacrifice themselves to please those far away in Brussels or Berlin. What will we say to future generations, he asks, when they curse us as idiots for allowing everything to be destroyed? No final decision has been taken yet about the extension of the Kaunertal reservoir and the building of a new one in Plazaal. Heinie Glauser, an expert on mountain dams from Switzerland, is more optimistic than most of those gathered here that the new project can be stopped on economic grounds alone. A key element of the scheme, known as pump storage, plays on the variations in the electricity market cheap during the night and in summer at times of low demand, expensive when it's most needed. That used to work well, but the price difference has been eroded by the rapid expansion of solar and wind power in Germany, he explains. The sun puts energy into the grid in the middle of the day, while wind works best in winter during the times of peak demand. Hydropower has a part in a renewable energy future, he accepts, but not such a big one as its champions predict. Slate grey cows graze the grass beside a silver stream which flows straight from a glacier at the head of the Placetal. The bells round their necks sound like church bells at one or other of Franz Reich's weddings, but not both.
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Nick Bryant
Nick Thorpe in the Meadows of the High Tyrol, bringing this edition to a close. I'm back with more from correspondence far and wide on both Thursday and Saturday of next week, and I hope you'll join us. Goodbye.